Foster care works -- group homes don't

University of Illinois researchers have good data showing that

Kids (mostly adolescents) who enter group home placements are about two-and-a-half times more likely to enter the juvenile-justice system relative to similar kids, with similar backgrounds, who are served in foster-home settings.

Details here.

Mixing god and politics: toxic cocktail?

Kevin Coe, a doctoral student in speech communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has just coauthored with David Scott Domke The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. I haven't read it but I'm skittish about newly discovered watersheds, like their claim that things changed profoundly in 1980. Meanwhile he has some interesting thoughts on it here:

"What the omnipresence of the God strategy has created is a de facto religious test. ...We've created an environment that essentially excludes those who feel that faith is a deeply private matter, those who believe that religion can be practiced without being preached, those who observe a faith other than Christianity, and those who choose not to believe in a higher power. That environment is not good for democracy, nor is it good for religion."