But the two leading feature articles in this issue exhibit the urgency of good data and their ability to help improve the quality of our lives and build a more just society.
The AIDS epidemic has always been much more than a medical problem. It has been a social justice issue ever since the very first cases of the illness in this country were diagnosed in Los Angeles in 1981 as "gay-related immune deficiency syndrome" (GRIDS). The epidemic has also been an enduring challenge to our public health system, which was never designed to care for large numbers of young people with a protracted illness but without private health insurance. The political, cultural, and financial battles over research and treatment have raged for nearly two decades.
Yet only today can we point to data documenting the uneven quality of care throughout the United States and the wildly fragmented and wholly inefficient approach to financing the costs of that care. Only with this type of information can we craft reforms that might inject more fairness into the health care system and, in the process, save more lives. As Martin Shapiro and Sam Bozzette explain in their cover story, such reforms would benefit not just people with AIDS but people with all kinds of chronic and terminal illnesses.
The second case in point involves the continuing evaluation of California's massive effort to reduce the size of primary-grade classes. One of the most politically popular and generously funded educational reforms in U.S. history, this class-size reduction program might end up a victim of its own success, unless state officials can heed the warnings from the early data.
In the rush to reduce class sizes in California, there have not been enough classrooms and teachers to go around. As a result, the most overcrowded schools have benefited the least, placing the most disadvantaged children at an even greater disadvantage and almost defeating one of the purposes of this monumental investment. But all is not lost, at least not yet, because midcourse corrections can get the program back on track. Thanks to the data-gathering and number-crunching efforts of Brian Stecher and a statewide research consortium, there is more reason to hope that smaller class sizes will boost the prospects of millions of children, especially of those children who need help the most.
And that's pretty exciting.
--John Godges