National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse | Sharing research, tips & promising practices promoting & supporting responsible fatherhood programs, fathers & families.

National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse | Sharing research, tips & promising practices promoting & supporting responsible fatherhood programs, fathers & families.



The goals of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) are to provide, facilitate, and disseminate current research, proven and innovative strategies that will encourage and strengthen fathers and families, and providers of services via the following priorities:

Multimedia
Responsible Fatherhood Toolkit
Introducing the Financial Empowerment Innovation Fund

Take The President's Fatherhood Pledge

President Obama grew up without his dad, and has said that being a father is the most important job he has. That's why the President is joining dads from across the nation in a fatherhood pledge — a pledge that we'll do everything we can to be there for our children and for young people whose fathers are not around.

New York
Across every state there are efforts to help support the positive and engaged involvement of fathers in the lives of their children and families.

• For Dads
  • Tips and Activities
  • Connect with Programs
  • Become a Mentor

Christopher Columbus' lost ship, the Santa Maria, may have been found

A world-renowned explorer believes he’s found Christopher Columbus’ long-lost cargo ship, the Santa Maria, which was wrecked in a storm more than 500 years ago.

“Ideally, if excavations go well, and depending on the state of preservation of any buried timber, it may ultimately be possible to lift any surviving remains of the vessel, fully conserve them and then put them on permanent public exhibition in a museum in Haiti,” Clifford said.

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the ship, the Independent newspaper reported.

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King’s kids’ private school and the Common Core

State Education Commissioner John King has taken a lot of heat for one particular detail from his family life: The head of New York State’s public education system sends his two young daughters to Woodland Hill Montessori, a private school that describes itself as “nestled in the hills of North Greenbush.”

King’s kids’ private school and the Common Core
Parent Groups in New York Call for Commissioner John King to Resign
The NYS Commissioner of Education sends his own children to a private school, a school that is not legally bound to carry out the same testing and data sharing mandates that he is subjecting thousands of public school children to. He has stated, “I believe that every parent should have the right to choose the school that is right for their child.” 

In the past three years, New York has become a national leader in implementing Common Core standards. The state's educator engagement site, called EngageNY.org, has had over 50 million page views by educators throughout the state and country who want to learn more about Common Core implementation and access the state's Common Core curriculum modules and videos. Through Race to the Top funding, network teams were launched in every region of the state and in every large district to provide training and embedded support to educators around implementation of the Common Core and the resources on EngageNY.org. In 2013, New York became one of the first states in the country to administer exams that measure whether students are meeting Common Core standards.

Civil Rights Project Reports Deepening Segregation and Challenges Educators and Political Leaders to Develop Positive Policies

On May 17, 1954, the Unites States Supreme Court ruled “separate educational facilities are 

inherently unequal,” thereby ending nearly 60 years of de jure racial segregation in seventeen states. 

Despite initial challenges, by 1970, Southern schools were the most integrated schools for black 

students in the country. Beginning in the 1990s, however, a series of Supreme Court decisions 

allowed for the abandonment of desegregation plans in favor of neighborhood schools, and cut 

funding intended to remedy the educational harm caused by segregation. The effect was an almost 

immediate return to segregated schools for many American students. 

The Civil Rights Project today released three new studies showing persistent and serious increases in segregation by race and poverty, with very dramatic results in the South and West, the nation’s two largest regions where students of color now comprise the majority of public school enrollment. 

For decades, the Civil Rights Project has monitored the success of American schools in reaching the goals of integrating schools and equalizing opportunity in a changing society. Segregation is directly linked to severe problems, such as high dropout rates, lack of experienced teachers, and fewer resources. E Pluribus… Separation summarizes the most rigorous research to date showing that segregated schools are systematically linked to these and other unequal educational opportunities.

This new research by the Civil Rights Project includes an extensive report on national trends, “E Pluribus… Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students,” as well as two smaller regional reports, “The Western States: Profound Diversity but Severe Segregation for Latino Students,” and “Southern Slippage: Growing School Segregation in the Most Desegregated Region of the Country.”

In the reports, the authors underscore the fact that simply sitting next to a white student does not guarantee better educational outcomes for students of color. Instead, the resources including expert and experienced teachers and advanced courses that are consistently linked to predominately white and/or wealthy schools help foster real and serious educational advantages over minority segregated settings.

The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, has taken no significant action to increase school integration or to help stabilize diverse schools undergoing racial change due to changes in the housing market. Small positive steps in civil rights enforcement by the current administration have, however, been undermined by the strong pressure it used to expand charter schools, the most segregated sector of schools for African American students.

Latino students, who  attend more intensely segregated and impoverished schools than they have for generations. The segregation  increases for Latinos are most dramatic in the West. 

In spite of declining residential segregation for black families, and their large-scale movement to the 

suburbs in most parts of the country, school segregation for black students remains very high and is 

increasing most severely in the South, which led the nation in school integration after the l960s 

desegregation struggles took effect. 

Segregation is directly linked to  severe problems, such as high dropout rates, lack of experienced teachers, and fewer resources. E Pluribus… Separation summarizes the most rigorous research to date showing that segregated schools are systematically linked to these and other unequal educational opportunities.

Founded in 1996 by former Harvard professors Gary Orfield and Christopher Edley, Jr., the Civil Rights 

Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles is now co-directed by Orfield and Patricia Gándara, professors at UCLA. 

Impact of Racially and Socioeconomically Isolated Schools 

Before describing current enrollment trends in the United States, it is important to understand the impact of segregated schools on student outcomes. Racially and socioeconomically isolated schools are strongly related to a range of poor educational outcomes, including less experienced and less qualified teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, less successful peer groups, and inadequate facilities and learning materials. While studies have documented teachers as having the single largest impact on student academic achievement, highly qualified, experienced teachers are less likely to teach in low-income, high minority schools than their less experienced peers. For those who do, overall salaries and advanced training opportunities are lower, and curricula are often less challenging and more reliant on rote skills and memorization than in schools in more affluent neighborhoods. 

Coleman Report.pdf: Equality of Educational Opportunity (COLEMAN) Study

Perhaps the single best-known piece of social science research ever done in this country is the study produced by sociologist James Coleman in 1966 under the authority of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, commonly called “the Coleman Report.” Coleman’s work is the second largest social science research project in history, covering 600,000 children in 4,000 schools nationally. Federal Education Policy and the States, 1945-2009

Facebook buys virtual reality co. Oculus for $2B

Facebook said Tuesday, March 25, 2014, it has agreed to buy Oculus for $2 billion, betting that its virtual reality may be a new way for people to communicate, learn or be entertained.

Irvine, Calif.-based Oculus VR Inc. makes the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that's received a lot of attention from video game developers, though it has yet to be released for consumers. The headsets cover a user's eyes and create an immersive world that reacts to turning one's head or moving back and forth.

Facebook plans to build on Oculus' technology, developing th virtual reality headset for other areas such as communications, education, and entertainment.

What is the Oculus Rift?

Picture a set of ski goggles in which a large cellphone screen replaces the glass. The screen displays two images side by side, one for each eye. A set of lenses is placed on top of the screen, focusing and reshaping the picture for each eye, and creating a stereoscopic 3D image. 

CAREERS

Oculus Rift HD virtual reality head-mounted display

Left Brain Talks To The Right Hand, Study Finds

The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that our brains are hard-wired to process gestures and speech and language on the same side of the brain. For right-handed people, that's usually the left side.

It also supports the view that speech arose from a combination of short sounds and hand gestures that were intended to communicate something. Those gestures probably would have been carried out by the right hand, since that is usually the dominant hand.

There's lots of other evidence that gestures were involved in early language, says David Armstrong,

Mike Dutton, Doodler

Dorothy Irene Height helped convince President Dwight Eisenhower to desegregate schools, encouraged President Lyndon Johnson to appoint black women to government positions, counseled First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, stood next to Dr. King when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and sat on the stage for President Barack Obama's first inauguration. Monday marks the 102nd anniversary of her birthday, a moment celebrated by a Google Doodle in her honor.

Over nearly 80 years of service, Ms. Height fought for the rights of African Americans, women, and handicapped people. Yet her vast career was nearly nipped in the bud.

You can watch President Obama’s eulogy of Height below

After growing up in a steel town outside Pittsburgh, she was admitted to Barnard College in New York. However once she arrived on campus in 1929, administrators told her that she needed to leave. The school had an unwritten rule that it would only accept two black students per year. Height was the odd woman out.

"Too distraught to call home, as she later wrote, Ms. Height did the only thing possible," the New York Times wrote in her 2010 obituary. "Clutching her Barnard acceptance letter, she took the subway downtown to New York University. She was admitted at once, earning a bachelor’s degree in education there in 1933 and a master’s in psychology two years later."

In fact, Barnard turned away another future public servant that same year. Sylva Gelber, who played a role in the women's movement in Canada, was rejected because “the Jewish quota was already filled.”

Her achievements include lobbying first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights as a YWCA worker during protests in New York's Harlem, helping to convince President Eisenhower to desegregated schools, and helping to organise the 1963 March on Washington.

Dorothy Irene Height: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
Gay Community Loses Black Civil Rights Ally Dorothy Height
Height told the audience at the 1997 Human Rights Campaign National Dinner, which was honoring her civil rights work: "Civil rights are civil rights. There are no persons who are not entitled to their civil rights. ... We have to recognize that we have a long way to go, but we have to go that way together."

Dorothy I. Height

top: Seen with President Kennedy as he signs the Equal Pay Act. below: President Obama signs a bill in her honor