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Whirlpool (the appliance manufacturer) donated washers and driers to schools and increased attendance.
According to Whirlpool's research, one in five school children report difficulty finding clean clothes to wear to school. It turns out that offering free in-school laundry services to kids with attendance problems increases their attendance.
When compared to factors like economic opportunity, unemployment, and institutional racism, laundry seems pretty inconsequential in the fight to keep kids in school. But while that might be the case for their parents, for a ten-year-old who already has the odds stacked against them, having nothing clean to wear to school could be the deciding factor in whether or not they want to face their classmates that day.
I can remember my grandmother telling me that she thought lunches in schools were a wonderful innovation, because they didn't have anything like that when she was a girl, and many children couldn't come because they wouldn't have lunch. I'm sure back then nobody thought of lunch as something school should provide. Now apparently laundry is the next big innovation.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 18 2016, @08:01AM
You keep claiming things that aren't that far left of the U.S. but in reality are quite different. You claim, for example that the health care systems in the U.K. and Canada are not that far from the U.S.
So you're saying the U.S. presumes that you have a right to healthcare? That they too have to haggle between insurance and the doctor to figure out how much they owe out of pocket after deductables, disallowed treatments, and co-pays are accounted for? That they get dozens of bills for a single instance of care? That they are considered personally responsible for whatever their insurance company decides (post-facto) that it doesn't care to cover?
I'd say there's a world of difference in healthcare.
To get a good idea of how far to the right the U.S. has moved, look at Eisenhower. If you didn't know he was a Republican, you'd swear he was a leftish Democrat. Pretty much every 1st world country's right looks left of the Republicans and often left of the Democrats as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @04:22PM
Funny you should bring that up.
Yes.
A right is something you are in the right to do. It doesn't mean that you can demand it as a prerogative, or that you can impose a duty on other; merely that you are at liberty to do so if you should choose. In the USA, if you can find a doctor with whom you are able to make a mutually agreeable arrangement (generally possible) then receiving medical care is not a cause for going to jail.
But let's go deeper, shall we? More than a right, in the US, it's actually a prerogative for many people, in many cases. You may not be turned away from an emergency room, should you seek medical care there. (There are some other cases, but this is the most famous so what the hell I'll make it my example.) There is a clear, legally enforceable duty on the part of an emergency room to offer you some level of access to medical care.
On top of that, there are quite a few cases where the cost of medicine is socialised to a greater or lesser extent. VA, Medicare, Medicaid are again the most famous but certain forms of Social Security payments can also go under that heading, depending on where you go.
The big difference in the USA with respect to the UK and Canada (both of which have private health care systems, however atrophied) lies in the question of payment, and how much of an open-ended guarantee it is. In point of fact, you could easily say that if the USA had a military relatively similar in size per capita to that of the UK, the USA could afford universal tax-paid health care. The problem is that the situations are not symmetrical. The USA has nobody to fall back on in military matters. The UK does - the USA. In other words, the american tax base is subsidising health care in the UK.
Now, conversely, the notion of a "right" to medical care in Canada and the UK is rather truncated, because if the public health care system decides not to offer you what you want, or need, or not in a timely fashion, you get to ... experience the reality that public health care in Canada is a privilege granted at the pleasure of the government, on its terms, with its formulary, and that it has so long been so hostile to its private health care system that the alternative barely exists any more. (Not speculation. Been there. Suffered that. And it's no joke that medical tourism in the USA from Canada is alive and well.)
Yes, Virginia, in Canada health care is a privilege. In the US it's a right.