'A Different World' 25th Anniversary: Where Are They Now? (PHOTOS)
25 years ago today, comedian and icon Bill Cosby introduced America to a spinoff adapted from his very own -- and hugely successful and influential -- The Cosby Show, titled A Different World. Starring Lisa Bonet, Jada Pinkett, Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison and Darryl M. Bell among others, the comedy sitcom followed the lives of African-American students as they experienced the trials and tribulations of college life at a Historically Black university.
Over the course of six seasons, the show became a TV fan favorite, resulting in superstardom for the show’s cast members.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the popular series we're taking a look back at the gang 'from' Hillman College and asking 'Where are they now?'
NYC Schools Offer Morning-After Pill - What It Means for Latina Teen Pregnancy
Plan B is distributed to teenage girls without parental consent in 13 New York Schools. (Plan B)
For the past year, New York City schools have tested a pilot program that provides Plan B, or the "morning-after pill," free of cost to teenage girls without parental consent in 13 high schools across the city. The program has had a particular impact on Latina students -- many of the pilot schools are located in areas with high Latino populations, including Queens and the Bronx.
Although the program -- called CATCH, or Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Health -- allows parents to opt-out their daughters, only 1 to 2 percent of parents have chosen to do so after letters were sent to their homes, according to Deborah Kaplan, assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health for the NYC Department of Health. The pilot program, in which school nurses and physicians are allowed to distribute the morning-after pill, is the first of its type in the city, and its effectiveness in decreasing high school pregnancies has yet to be determined.
Why Are New York's Teen Pregnancy Rates So Much Lower Than Mississippi's?
Hayden Panettiere talks to New York City students about teen pregnancy
Photograph by Bryan Bedder.
If you want to measure the vast and possibly growing cultural divide
between red and blue states in this country, there are plenty of metrics
you could use, from divorce and teen pregnancy rates to the number of
people who list 30 Rock as a favorite show on their online dating profiles. Today's news provides us with one more gauge: public school sex-ed.
Mississippi's teen pregnancy problem has gotten so out of control—they lead the nation in teen births—that legislators there have finally cracked and
passed a law aimed at improving sex education in the schools. But the
new regulations kowtow so much to anti-sex radicals that it's hard to
believe that this represents any kind of improvement at all. Even
though 95 percent of all Americans have sex before marriage and 99 percent of sexually active women use
contraception at some point, the Mississippi law assumes that these
life choices fall somewhere between "highly controversial" and
"unmentionably evil." The state's public school sex-ed instructors are
specifically forbidden to show students how to use condoms, boys and
girls must be separated for class even though they're usually together
for actual sex, parents can opt out completely, and school districts
were given the opportunity to choose an "abstinence-only"
curriculum—which the majority of them did. Still, some schools now have
more comprehensive programs that actually teach about preventing
pregnancy and disease in a realistic manner, making this a small step
towards progress for Mississippi.
Meanwhile, in New York City, some schools have gone beyond simply teaching about contraception to actually offering it to students. The New York Times reports today on a pilot program in 13 schools (chosen, quite logically, because of high teenage pregnancy rates and low access to contraception) that gives students the opportunity to get contraception, including emergency contraception, directly from the school or to get referrals to a local provider who can serve them better. Only 1 to 2 percent of parents opted out of the program, demonstrating that New York parents understand that you can't unring a bell. They should tell the president, who caved to the notion that putting emergency contraception out of the reach of teenagers somehow creates a time vortex that undoes the sex that already happened.
National Punctuation Day: Answering the Question, "Does it Go Here or There?"
Today is National Punctuation Day, a celebration of the little-known or forgotten information about those tiny dots, curves, and symbols that add so much character to our language.I thought I would contribute to National Punctuation Day by shedding light on some uses of punctuation placement that will help keep your grammar skills sharp in this age of texting and email.
How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America
It's not easy to balance the advantages of a college degree with the deficiencies of a liberal arts education. But at schools like Babson College, entrepreneurship is a core part of the curriculum.
Reuters
When are Americans going to wake up and realize that the 60s
and 70s-era nostalgia for the "value" of a college degree is just that
-- nostalgia?A degree does not guarantee you or your children a good job anymore. In fact, it doesn't guarantee you a job: last year, 1 out of 2 bachelor's degree holders under 25 were jobless or unemployed. Since the recession, we've lost millions of high- and mid-wage jobs -- and replaced a handful of those with lower-wage ones. No wonder some young people are giving up entirely -- a 16.8 percent unemployment rate plus soaring student loan debt is more than a little discouraging. Yet old-guard academic leaders are still clinging to the status quo -- and loudly insisting that a four-year liberal arts degree is a worthy investment in every young American's future.
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