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“In the history of educational technology there has never been an instance of large-scale … data-intensive corporate learning infrastructure that has met the needs of learners,” she said. “This is because people are nuanced in how they learn. The goal with these technologies is to make money, not [to] support people’s unique learning, teaching and working styles.”

A woman exchanges EBT dollars for product vouchers at the West End Farmers’ Market in Hartford on June 29, 2025. The market collaborates with End Hunger CT, which doubles up to $20 EBT dollars.

Charter schools also use a variety of techniques to control which students they will choose to serve. They can establish bureaucratic obstacles that filter out families that lack the resources to jump such hurdles. They can limit their applicants by limiting their services in areas such as special education. Robert Pondiscio’s 2019 book How The Other Half Learns details how New York’s Success Academy filters out families that don’t meet their preferred profile. A demanding application process, repeated meetings that lay out the demands of the charter, measuring sessions for school uniforms, and pre-school orientation meetings all help Success Academy filter out the parents who are unable or unwilling to meet their requirements For charter schools, student success is a critical piece of marketing; also, in some cases, their program is only geared toward a specific sector of students.

Margaret Lee is a retired Principal Social Worker with experience in Child and Family Services, as well as on Child Protection Committee.

Sue-Anne Hunter has been appointed Australia’s first National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People. Hunter will lead efforts to close the gap on over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care and prison.

Nearly 10 South Koreans aged 65 and above died by suicide each day between 2019 and 2023, according to a new medical study in the Journal of the Korean Medical Association.

The FDA is specifically targeting 7-OH, a concentrated byproduct of the kratom plant; it is not focused on natural kratom leaf products. 7-OH is increasingly recognized as having potential for abuse because of its ability to bind to opioid receptors. The FDA is releasing a new report to educate the public about the health concerns of 7-OH and its distinction from the kratom plant leaf.

Forget partisan finger-pointing. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal cuts across party lines, indicting economic and political elites alike. Above: Former president Bill Clinton shakes hands with Jeffrey Epstein, while Ghislaine Maxwell looks on, following an event for the White House Restoration Project, in Washington, DC, on September 29, 1993.

A list of the forthcoming retractions Frontiers provided us names one paper from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, six from Frontiers in Public Health, 29 from Frontiers in Energy Research, 33 from Frontiers in Environmental Science, and 53 from Frontiers in Psychology. Most were published in 2022.

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus.

This is an exceptional and pivotal opportunity for the right social work leader to guide the creation of the new National Social Work Agency and to have a lasting influence on the future of the social work profession in Scotland.

The Austrian Professional Association of Social Work (obds), in collaboration with a broad alliance of professional bodies, academic institutions, and community networks, has officially launched the Qualification Framework for Social Work in Austria. This milestone, finalised in June 2025, marks a significant advancement in the professionalisation and academisation of social work in Austria.

Without high-quality data, the policy reforms needed to address underserved and historically marginalised populations become harder to make. How can we create evidence-based policy with no evidence?

Flock is a $7.5 billion surveillance technology company, operating in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock has a proven playbook to expand through securing local government contracts, often behind closed doors. Flock’s technology has been used to assist with everything from ICE investigations in Illinois to abortion investigations in Texas.

To some extent, the conflict was embedded in the very design of the panel. When those with sharply opposing views are brought together without agreement on the evidence base, gridlock is a likely result. Still, the impasse underlines the need for more independent, high-quality research on the effects of antidepressants during pregnancy – research that can inform not only regulators but also doctors and patients.

I’m a social work faculty member, grief researcher and the founder of the Young Widowhood Project, a research initiative aimed at expanding scholarship and public understanding of premature spousal loss.Above: Rain falls over a makeshift memorial for flood victims along the Guadalupe River on July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas.

A journal purporting to be “cited by esteemed scholars and scientists all around the world” claims a false impact factor and attempts to charge authors a fee for withdrawing articles, Retraction Watch has learned. And the editor in chief publicly disavows any relationship with the title on his website.

Those of us used to writing on social policy matters are always cautioned against dating our work too quickly. This warning feels especially relevant when revisiting my two previous Transforming Society posts. In the first one, I welcomed the new ‘grown-up’ government and in the second, signalled cautious optimism for the first budget. However, writing today, defending the government’s actions is becoming increasingly untenable. To all intents and purposes, they are a continuation of the welfare cruelty I really hoped we’d see the back of. It is perhaps true that we project onto those with power our own hopes for what can and should change, even when they have stubbornly refused to suggest this is in their plans.

Among the 138 recommendations of the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry’s final report to parliament was a clear call: remove the legal time limits that prevent survivors of historic abuse from seeking justice in civil court. That report – Whanaketia – Through pain and trauma, from darkness to light – was published on July 24 last year. One year on, the government has yet to act.

Thanks to a $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy, the Medical Evidence Project will leverage the tools of forensic metascience — using visual and computational methods to determine a paper’s trustworthiness — to rapidly identify problems in scientific articles, combined with the experience and platform of Retraction Watch to disseminate those findings.

AARP Senior Vice President of Campaigns John Hishta issued the following statement on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments on a “backdoor to privatizing” Social Security.

Family associations and social groups were the backbone of social, economic and political organization in the early days of Chicago’s Chinatown. Is that still the case today? Above: The Hip Sing Association currently has its headquarters in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, next to the Argyle El stop.

“More than 4 in 5 Americans (83%) are concerned about the price of groceries, with nearly half (46%) saying they are very concerned,” writes the Century Foundation. “Nearly half (47%) of Americans are worried about their current ability to pay their rent or mortgage. And nearly two-thirds (64%) worry about their ability to pay an unexpected medical expense if one should arise. Nearly half of all Americans (48%) believe they would have difficulty paying an unexpected $500 bill without borrowing.”

One woman from Guildford who has made supporting those who need it most part of her daily life for the last twenty years is Ann Mather (centre left).

There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.

NUS Head of Department of Social Work Associate Professor Lee Geok Ling with Professor Kieran O’Donoghue. For more than a decade, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University’s Head of School of Social Work Professor Kieran O’Donoghue has nurtured a deep and rewarding relationship with Singapore’s social work community.

PACE Society, a non-profit that supports sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, is closing after 31 years. In a message posted to its website, the society said it was closing because of “operational challenges, funding gaps, and debts,” as well as its charitable funding status being revoked, which affected what kind of funding it could apply for.

Between 60 and 65 percent of customers at the Fuerte Meat Market in East Chicago, Indiana, use SNAP benefits. Indiana is among several states restricting the purchase of sugary foods with nutrition assistance funds.

Ben Schlesinger survived the war through the ingenuity of his stepmother, his own faith and initiative and the help of Jewish organizations around the world that serendipitously came at the right time. He became a renowned professor of social work, applying his passion for family to those he helped. He was the first social work professor in Canada to be elected as a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

A report commissioned by ministers said the Adult Disability Payment was a “great foundation” which was “significantly more compassionate” than benefits on offer in the rest of the UK. However, it said too many disabled people still found the system difficult to navigate, and said eligibility criteria should be reviewed. As it stands, the number of people claiming the payment is forecast to grow from 379,000 in 2024-25 to 703,000 in 2030-31.

The documents are being assessed by the Truth Recovery Independent Panel. More than 10,000 women and girls passed through around a dozen “mother-and-baby” institutions between the 1920s and the 1990s. In Northern Ireland, there were also three Magdalene Laundries – in effect, workhouses where women and girls were made to carry out demanding duties. The institutions were mainly run by religious organisations.

The Cunliffe Review published its findings last week, recommending that water firms be issued fines to finance the replacement of Ofwat with a new regulator that will try to tackle ever-increasing pollution and spiralling bills. But attempting to fix the water industry through regulation is like trying to fix a burst pipe with a small piece of duct tape; it cannot stem the tide when the root cause of the problem is privatisation itself.

SWAS aims to provide South Asian practitioners with a space to share experiences and challenge the stereotypes that afflict practice with people from similar backgrounds

Both people who have had DMT trips and those who have had NDEs often see tunnels.

In Peru, thousands of older adults live in extreme poverty but are unable to access social programs like Pensión 65. The system that determines which households need support has excluded more than 81,000 elderly people. Errors stem from poorly collected data, incomplete or outdated records, and a system that relies on an algorithm to make decisions based on faulty information. In this case, the algorithm is an automatic formula that calculates a score to estimate whether a family is poor, extremely poor, or not poor

Two senators introduced a resolution Tuesday evening to preserve the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, following reports that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may soon fire its current members.

Dr. Katie Gibson — a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s Crown School of Social Work — summed up her research in her 211-page dissertation, which was later published in excerpted form by the peer-reviewed journal Social Service Review. To learn how the drugs were “framed in policy and regulated in practice,” Gibson conducted an ethnographic study, sitting side-by-side with prescribers and reviewers.

The bootstraps narrative is near and dear to Americans’ hearts. But it’s a fiction, one that obscures complex relationships of interdependence and generates a culture of self-blame. It’s time to bust the myth for good. Above: Commuters walk to work over London Bridge in London, England.

Delivering the NT government’s response to the report on Tuesday, Domestic Violence Prevention Minister Robyn Cahill (above) said the recommendations were “uninspiring” and failed to hit the mark.

Last week’s stories, from Columbia’s settlement with the federal government to another state’s foray into direct admissions.

The average, midsized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the use of a thousand homes. Larger data centers might use 4.5 million gallons a day, depending on their type of water cooling system. Austin has 47 such data centers, while the Dallas-Fort Worth area hosts the majority in Texas at 189. Let’s waste more environmental resources on underdeveloped, non-transparent, corporate profiteering!

Carmen Prefontaine, vice-president of CUPE Manitoba, is running in the Oct. 25 byelection…. She said she supports Mayor Scott Gillingham’s vision of shifting some of the city’s safety investments toward social services and health-based interventions. “I’m not sure armed officers are always the answer — social workers, public health, and other resources need to be available,” she said. “We need to respond to emergencies with the help that’s needed.”

It may very well be that “prompt engineering” will eventually be legitimized enough to be proposed as an automated, enshittified alternative to academic writing (a ubiquitous general education requirement which neoliberal university administrators have long fantasized about sunsetting). These certificate programs are no doubt imagined by some as a step in that direction. But I see the more imminent catastrophe as the rebirth of for-profit colleges, tapeworm-like, inside public universities. To cite another Cottom truism: “EdTech is a Trojan horse for elite capture of public resources. Every time.”

On 10 July 2025, overseas social workers across the UK gathered both in-person and online for the second annual BASW Diaspora Social Workers Conference. This year’s theme explored Resilient Diaspora Social Workers: Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Environments.

The fact I’m writing this in the form of a blog post is however the best indicator that academic blogging is far from dead. There’s a thriving ecosystem of multi-author blogs, online magazines and publication projects that have vastly expanded the range of forums in which academics can publish short form content, faster than would ever be possible through the journal system and to more diverse audiences.

Tim Winton (above) knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”. It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career. This was the 1980s, after a Labor government had temporarily made higher education free for all Australians.

Liang says she aspires to become a public servant, inspired by the social workers who lovingly nurtured her