“On nearly every single outcome that we can assess,” said Robert Pianta, dean of UVA’s Curry School of Education, professor of education and psychology, and founding director of UVA’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, “public schools have a marginal impact that is really small relative to the impact of families. The things that we worry about in terms of the state of the country are far more a function of the families the kids are growing up in than the school they go to.”
Experience suggests that we often don’t experience aging the same way, with many people feeling older or younger than they really are. “The extent to which older adults feel much younger than they are may determine important daily or life decisions for what they will do next,” UVA psychologist Brian Nosek said.
In Minnesota, the decision by Keith Ellison, the nation's first Muslim congressman, to run for state attorney general has set off a political frenzy for his congressional seat that includes two Muslim candidates, both Democrats: Ilhan Omar, the country's first Somali-American state lawmaker, and Jamal Abdulahi, a Somali-American activist. But historic wins in those and other races are far from assured, cautions Geoffrey Skelley, an associate editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political analysis website run by UVA’s Center for Politics.
(Commentary co-written by Kal Munis, Ph.D. candidate in UVA’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics) Recently, President Trump visited Montana to campaign against U.S. Sen. Jon Tester – hoping to help Tester’s Republican challenger, Matt Rosendale, this November. Many pundits are treating the upcoming midterms as a referendum on Trump. But, far away from D.C., in places like Montana, candidates are sparring over something else: Who really has an authentic connection to the state? And, as our research reveals, connection to place matters a lot to voters.
"Yes, it will hurt Feinstein in some ways," said UVA political analyst Larry Sabato. "If it helps her though, it will be because this helps to position her as a moderate. It actually could attract a lot of Republican votes for her in November, especially considering the alternative."
The Dayton Public Schools Board of Education is scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to spend $475,000 on a “turnaround program” for five school buildings deemed by the district as under-performing. The project will contract with Partnership for Leaders in Education, a program based at the University of Virginia. It would spend the 2018-2019 school year assessing and designing a plan to improve the schools’ performance, and the following two years rolling out that plan.
On Monday, leaders with Charlottesville police and fire departments, Albemarle police, UVA and state police all spoke about their one unified plan for the upcoming anniversary.
For the wealthiest Americans, there may never be a better time to get divorced. A change in the new Republican tax law will eliminate a tax break for alimony payments that are finalized after Dec. 31, prompting financial planners and lawyers to warn wealthy clients that if they have been contemplating filing for divorce, they had better act fast. “If the new tax regime is more likely to disadvantage them economically, that could put some damper, I would say a slight damper, on divorce overall,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
In the next few weeks, lawmakers will be back in Richmond to vote on judges. But when they get behind closed doors, Democrats may launch a revolt against House Democratic Leader David Toscano of Charlottesville. Geoff Skelley at UVA’s Center for Politics says several members of the House Democratic Caucus want new leadership.
Once again, the UVA Health System is being honored for the care provided to patients, this time for those suffering from heart attacks. According to a release, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology gave UVA three awards.
The Virginia Biosciences Health Research Corporation, now known as Virginia Catalyst, has awarded a total of $2.7 million to six life and bioscience projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia. These grants, which will be met with nearly $5.7 million in matching funds from partner companies, are designed to support bioscience research in the commonwealth and spur local economic development. Projects funded in this round include: Project Focus: Biofabrication of Regenerative Musculoskeletal Therapeutics, Company: Embody, LLC (Norfolk), University collaborators: Old Dominion University and Universi...
Drivers paying a toll on Interstate 66 inside the Beltway can save a significant amount of money by just leaving a few minutes earlier or later, a new study finds. On Fridays, when telework is popular and other workers might take off for a long weekend, morning toll rates level off around 7:30 a.m. rather than spiking as they do on other weekdays, a UVA Center for Transportation Studies analysis found.
Only half of American voters believe that elections are fair and open. That’s the conclusion of a new poll from UVA’s Center for Politics and Ipsos. Geoff Skelley at the Center for Politics says Republicans are more likely to believe that elections are fair and open than Democrats. “Now I wonder if we had asked this question when Barack Obama was president if we might have found the reverse in terms of partisan breakdown or at least to some extent with Democrats expressing more confidence that the American election system is fair and open compared to Republicans.”
Just hours after Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman took the oath of office and asked a gaggle of White House reporters to pray for him. “Truman approached that meeting with a great deal of anxiety and insecurity. . . . He was very poorly informed about the complexities of the agreements that President Franklin Roosevelt had worked out during the war with Stalin,” said Melvyn Leffler, a University of Virginia historian and author of “A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War.”
Rosenthal basically says that Trump’s baggage will trump Pelosi’s, at least in competitive districts. He’s seconded by Larry Sabato, the seasoned political analyst at the University of Virginia. He told me that he’s not surprised by the candidate rebellion against Pelosi (“most people have seen this coming for quite a while”), and it has long been true that the anti-Pelosi ads “motivate some Republicans.” However, he said, “Pelosi is out of power, and Trump as the devil figure for swing voters has much more currency.”
Why proactive leadership is important – or how Congress could have prevented Trump’s Helsinki fiasco
(Commentary co-written by Thomas Bateman, UVA professor of management) Imagine you’re speeding along on a highway. Suddenly, the traffic ahead of you slows, forcing you to hit the brakes. Eventually you arrive at the source of the bottleneck: a mattress lying in the right lane. One by one, your fellow motorists simply crept around it. No one stopped to move it off the road to relieve the congestion. Why would so many people fail to take action and (easily) fix the problem that slowed traffic to a crawl? People – whether motorists, business leaders or lawmakers – are simply not very proactive. ...
New research shows that the processes involved in hair, fur, and feather growth are remarkably similar to the way scales grow on fish—a finding that points to a single, ancient origin of these protective coverings. A research team led by UVA’s Andrew Aman came to this conclusion after studying the patterns of growth in the scales of zebrafish, a well-studied aquatic animal (especially at the genetic level).
With less than four months until Election Day, a new poll reveals that just half of Americans believe elections in the United States are fair and open. The new poll from UVA’s Center for Politics comes on the heels of President Trump's Supreme Court pick and his comments about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Preventing autism could be as simple as modifying an expectant mom’s diet, according to new research from the University of Virginia.
Carl Cannon and Andrew Walworth interview the winners of the 2018 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, the University of Virginia Cyber Defense Team, and Dwayne Williams, the competition’s director.