Policy

Summary

References

Health in All Policies

“Education is another key determinant of health; education and health correspond closely and impact each other in both directions. People with higher levels of educational attainment consistently experience lower risks ofr a wide array of illnesses and increased life expectancy. They all experience improved future economic well-being. In turn, educational attainment itself is shaped by health. For example the health of students significantly impacts school dropout rates, attendance, and academic performance.”

“Structural racism contributes to persistent inequiteis. … Even at equivalent income levles, people of color in the United States consistently experience significantly higher rates of illness and injury than their White counterparts”

“higher overall inequality is consistently associated with worse helaht outcomes at all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder”

“incorporate sustainability into the work.”

“brings together partners from many sectors to recognize the links between helath and other issue and policy ares, break down silos, and build new partnerships to promote helath and equity and increase government efficiency. Agencies that are not typically considered as health agencies play a major role in shaping the economic, physical, social, and service environments in which people live, and therefore have an important role to play in promoting helaht and equity.”

“‘embedding’ or institutionalizing’ Health in All Policies within existing or new structures and processes of government”

Education

Summary

Educational Theories

  • Education Theories
    • “Learning is defined as a process that brings together personal and environmental experiences and influences for acquiring, enriching and modifying one’s knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, behaviors, and worldviews.” International Bureau fo Education
    • Theories:
      • Behaviorism: impressing knowledge through physical/external stimuli; how to respond to students
      • Cognitive: internal processes of external sources; empowering students to have full competency and control of mental processes and interpretation
      • Constructivism: build on prior knowledge, experiences and make own understanding of new materials; student able to personalize lesson based on student
      • Humanism: learning through self-defined processes; creating the best environment where learning can happen - supplying needs
      • Connectivism: being able to find out information at a frequency level in order to find new knowledge; how learner interacts with people and material
      • Transformative: reflecting on new knowledge based on experience in order to bring about potential change; reflection, reassessing, processing, evolving
      • Social: observe the model (or avoid modeling) behaviors; active, imitation
      • Experiental: teaching by allowing person to do; active, doing/ application
    • Learning experience can determine person effective work environment
    • References:
      • 5 educational learning theories and how to apply them
      • 5 Educational Learning Theories

Hahn and Truman

Article: Education Improves Public Health and Promotes Health Equity

Article devoted to summary of supporting field evidence (cited references are research studies). Article does present a opposing stance. Gaps in summarized supporting field presented.

Purpose: call for public health intervention applied to education and policies
How: describing and providing evidence of education’s pathways, link, and implications on health
How: systematic review and summary of research evidence
Significance: programs and policies within education will close health inequity gaps

Definitions:
Education is the mean of socialization, skill development, and awareness in order to function in society productively. Education is formal and largely informal.

education definition, concepts, domains:
knowledge physical
skills of reasoning values
intellectual problem solving
socio-emotional awareness and control self-regulation
social interactions
education process objectives: yield members of society that are:
engaged
productive
creative
self governing

Summary:

  • US fails to fulfill education’s objectives by not meeting definition, concepts, and domains
  • Failure to meet education’s objectives has causal link to health
  • Previous relationships of public health and education
    • health is a prerequisite for education
    • education about health - teaching about health is a public health intervention
    • physical education in schools - schools should explain importance of and practice physical activity on health
  • Proposed relationships of education and health
    • education as a personal attribute is a central conceptual component and essential element of health
      • education helps define a person through it’s definition, concepts and domains
      • and who a person is makes up the health of the person
    • education is a contributing cause of health
  • Gap: “The public health community should expand research to better understand the causal relationships between education and health and thereby identify evidence-based educational policies that have great potential to improve public health”
    • The Broad Concept of Education
      • “education’s beneficial effects are pervasive, cumulative, and self-amplifying, growing across life course”
    • Education as an Element of Health
      • education is basic function of living with agreeance of many international organizations
    • Measures of Education as a Personal Attribute
      • measure gap in measure
        school years attained does not describe competency
        school level completed varies in quality and quantity about education
        standardized test not able to compare population
        teacher-assigned grade relect academic and classroom achievement but is subjective and bias
    • Evidence of Causal Association
      • Criteria for causality in public health
        • Strength of association linking hypothetical cause and outcome (as assessed, eg, by the magnitude of relative risks)
        • Consistency of findings, eg, by different researchers in different settings
        • Specificity – the connection of specific, narrow causes to specific outcomes
        • Temporal sequence — the necessity of cause preceding consequence
        • Dose–response relationship
        • Plausibility in terms of current knowledge
        • Coherence – similar to plausibility, the fit with other contemporary knowledge
        • Experiment – offering the strongest support
        • Analogy – the comparability of postulated causality with causality in similar phenomena
    • Associations Causal Path model
      Health Risk and Protective Behaviors are Associated with Academic Achievement
      Wages and Income, Resources for Health, Are Associated with Educational Success
      Self-Assessed Health is Associated with Educational Attainment
      Morbidity is Associated with Educational Attainment
      Mortality and Life Expectancy are Associated with Educational Attainment
    • Educational Experiments and Qausi-Experiments
      • In different experiments, overall results showed, early childhood programs have positive associations with better health interventions often including parent involvement.
        Experiments showed a difference in health after providing early childhood program accompanied government benefit programs (social services, food, health care) and routine schooling
      • Policy: Increasing the mandatory school age, reduced mortality and increased life expectancy with positive association with better rates of crime, arrest, incarceration, teenage birth, self-rated health, bmi, and smoking.
        Because of various outcomes, it shows education is the underlying mechanism.
    • The Fallacy of the Endowment Hypothesis
      • intelligence - inherited biological trait with little affected by environment
      • Although there is an association with health outcomes (mortality, illnesses, self-rated health) and intelligence, intelligence effects on helath are largely mediated by education and income.

Article Conclusion

  • Causal Pathways and Evidence Linking Education and Health
    “Structural amplification condemns some families to concentration of low education with poor health across generations”
  • High Societal Price in Health Education Forgone
    • Societal/Economic impacts
      • death
      • economic cost
      • economic value
      • government benefits
  • Education as a Domain of Public Health Action
    • “Education as a means of public health intervention is more difficult to define, to administer, to measure, and to evaluate.”

American Public Health Association

Webpage list association found in cited references, describe intervention components and benefits, describes public health policy

Webpage does not do well with describing evidence or explaining. Webpage only listing factors without explanation, no information about associations.

Associations

Improved graduation rates Dropout High poverty/ minority schools Dropout school factors Dropout nonschool factors Learning and attendance Health risk behaviors *
better health poor and minority students inadequate, rundown facilities lack of rigor in curriculum poverty diabetes academic failure
lower medical cost receive lower peer pupil spending allocation lack of teacher preparation, experience, and attendance lack of parent participation in schooling sickle cell anemia school attendance
increased average lifespan have fewer placement courses larger class size low birth weight epilepsy grades
less likely to commit crime have less credentialed and qualified teachers who are absent more often lack of school safety lead poisoning disabilities test scores
less likely to rely on government health care experience higher teacher turnover poor teacher-student relationships hunger and poor nutrition lead poisoning attentiveness in class
less likely to use public services have larger class sizes absenteeism (associated with lower family income and lower academic achievement) lack of being read to nutrition and hunger
more likely to raise healthier, better-educated children have less technology-assisted instruction lack of careful student progress monitoring increased TV watching mental health problems
lack of school safety lack of parent availability
increased TV watching
frequent residence and school changes
health condition affecting learning and attendance
  • health risk behaviors - substance use, violence, physical inactivity, sexual intercourse, adolescent pregnancies, adolescent suicide attempts

Intervention - early childhood programs for low-income children

benefits components of high-quality school health programs policies
referrals for remedial classes or special education nutrition services linking education and health sectors
less absenteeism health services state level and local level
fewer retention in grade school physical education interagency collaboration
higher grades parent involvement targed countious efforts
higher graduation rates counseling, psychological, mentoring services to improve health, education, and well being of children
increased attendance in post-secondary education healthy school environment
protection against high risk behaviors health education (instruction in personal and social skills)
tutoring services

Broadly the webpage does not explain how these factors work in their associations. More specifically, absent from webpage is any explanation or emphasis of how school funding and community economics significance to education. From my knowledge, school funding comes from property tax which is the community economics which the webpage does not describe school communities.

Cohen and Syme

Article: Education: A Missed Opportunity for Public Health Intervention

Article is a review of evidence studies

Purpose: “to identify which components of educational policy and programs are essential for good health outcomes and their implications for public health interviewntiona nd health equity”

“Educational attainment is a well-established social determinant of health. Education is also one of the social determinants of health for which there are clear policy pathways for intervention.”

Specific elements of education that influence health
With educational institutions’ objective to impart knowledge:

Choosing and controlling for variables to reduce racial disparities and allowing context to the study population through the history of education policy requires review of education literature and public health literature.

Early Childhood education

Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education

Historical interventions that impacted education and health:

  • desegreation - federal level
    • associations improve school quality which associated with self rated health
  • dropout age - state level
    • association increase educational attainment, adulthood earning, their children’s educational attainment
  • class size - state/ district level
    • mixed research - associationed with higher early mortality, increased quality adjusted life years, lower educational quality

Higher Education

  • with increase in college attendance,
    • population health improves
    • but elite stratum arises
    • increase health inequity
    • higher education quality: reflect esiting previlige (more intangible)

“Education balance of social machinery - Horace Mann”

  • Field needs:
    • cost-benefit analysis to educational policies and programs
    • health impact assessments to educational policies and programs
    • analysis of
      • length of school year
      • length of school day
      • busing vs neighborhood schools vs full service community schools
      • benefits to health accured over the life course
    • ways to measure the quality of educational experience

Social Cohesion

Summary

References

Stress

Summary

References

Education and Social Cohesion

Summary

References