Kansas City, Missouri ~ Head Start Program

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TRANSCRIPT

JUDY WOODRUFF: Every year, thousands of children in this country are expelled from school before they reach kindergarten. In fact, studies show that preschool children are expelled at significantly rates than those in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Special correspondent Molly Knight Raskin reports on a program in Kansas City, Missouri, that’s trying to stem this trend by looking beyond the classroom to the issues these kids face at home.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: In many ways, Desiree Kazee, is a typical 5-year-old girl. She’s bubbly, bright and affectionate. Her favorite color is pink. And she enjoys drawing and dancing.

But, two years ago, when Desiree began preschool at a Head Start program near her home in Liberty, Missouri, she didn’t seem to enjoy much of anything.

RENEE SILVER, School Therapist: She was a very angry child. She would tantrum, she would scream, she would whine, she would complain of things bothering her that might not normally bother a child.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Renee Silver is a school therapist who worked individually with Desiree.

RENEE SILVER: She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She would want to do things when she wanted to do them. She did everything she could to try and gain control.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: In most classrooms, Desiree’s behavior would be met with harsh discipline, but in this Head Start school, the teachers don’t punish kids for acting out. That’s because all these children, including Desiree, have experienced at least one traumatic event in their short lifetimes.

JANINE HRON, CEO, Crittenton Children’s Center: This would be separation from parents. This would be incarcerated parents, substance abuse or untreated mental illness in the home, witnessing violent interactions, being abused themselves.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Janine Hron is the CEO of Crittenton Children’s Center, a psychiatrist hospital in Kansas City. In 2008, Hron and her team developed Head Start Trauma Smart, an innovative program that evidence-based trauma therapy into Head Start classrooms.

The program was created in response to the pervasiveness of trauma in the Kansas City area. Of the 4,000 kids in Head Start, 50 percent have experienced more than three traumatic events.

JANINE HRON: This is not a one-and-done kind of a bad experience. This happens over and over and over, and it becomes rather a lifestyle of trauma.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Studies show that one in four preschool-age children experience a traumatic event by the start of kindergarten. Because so many of these children respond to traumatic stress by acting out, they prove a challenge to teachers and caregivers, who find that traditional methods of, like scolding them or putting them in a time-out, don’t work. In fact, these methods often makes things worse, leading to suspension or expulsion.

Avis Smith, a licensed social work at Crittenton, explains why.

AVIS SMITH, Crittenton Children’s Center: Their behaviors are so extreme, that the adults don’t know how to keep everybody safe.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: In Head Start Trauma Smart, safety comes first. Molly Marx has been teaching in the program for five years.

MOLLY MARX, Teacher, Head Start: The first thing you have to do is make them feel safe. And if you’re not making them feel safe, they are not going to learn or improve. So, most of how we teach starts with complete social-emotional. I am here. I will keep you safe. Help me keep it that way.

WOMAN: This is where I would like you to sit today to make sure your body is safe.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: In training programs held year-round, Head Start Trauma Smart teachers learn to validate extreme emotions referred to as (INAUDIBLE) feelings using calm and quiet voices. They are also armed with practical and cognitive tools to help kids soothe themselves.

MOLLY MARX: In our room, the safe spot is in a really quiet corner, and it’s filled with kind of pillows and blankets. And then we have a calm down box. There are several sensory things that they can play with. We have squishy balls. We have sunglasses.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: All of the methods are aimed at quieting a tidal wave of emotions that often overwhelms these kids. Neuroscientists have found that trauma causes arrested development in children’s brains. This leaves them vulnerable to triggers that adults around them often don’t see.

AVIS SMITH: It might be a smell. It might be a touch. It might be a sound that that child experienced during that traumatic event that is a reminder for that child of what happened.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: This is the case for Desiree, who suffered traumatic events, including the incarceration of her mother and the death of a close family member. Desiree was also the victim of abuse.

The incident was so traumatizing that her father, Derek Kazee, said he saw a total shift in her personality.

DEREK KAZEE: Before everything, like, she just — she was a people person. She loved being around people. After the experience happened, she tended to turn off. She didn’t really want to be around adults. She didn’t want to be around kids. She just wanted to be at home, her safe spot.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Derek Kazee says it wasn’t until she began the trauma program that Desiree finally felt safe enough to go to school and to share her experience with the adults there. One of them was therapist Renee Silver, who works with kids individually to reinforce the self-regulating techniques of Head Start Trauma Smart.

In one activity, Silver applies lotion to Desiree’s hands.

RENEE SILVER: I’m going to get your pinkie and your ringy and your middle.

How often do kids get that nurturing, where each finger is individualized and pointed out, and they’re getting that focused attention, where nothing else matters? And so it really helps the kids. They — it’s almost like they melt.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: And it’s not just teachers and therapists who practice these techniques.

AVIS SMITH: Bus drivers, cooks, everyone who is in the life of that child.

Derek Kazee says he often works with Desiree at home, where they both use calm down stuff like counting and deep breathing.

DEREK KAZEE: Go ahead.

She tends to just walk away and calm herself down. And usually, like, before the program, she would just, you know, have a tantrum. Now she’s more in control of her feelings and her emotions. As a parent, it makes me completely happy.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Head Start Trauma Smart is still in its early stages, but it’s already showing promising results; 100 percent of the children enrolled have moved on to kindergarten. It’s this kind of success that Hron says she hopes will boosts the program’s growth nationwide.

JANINE HRON: If we can pull this off across the country, the dividends will be phenomenal.

MOLLY KNIGHT RASKIN: Some of the Head Start Trauma Smart results are harder to measure. But to those who care for these children, they are impossible to miss.

DEREK KAZEE: All right.

We don't need no stinkin' cupcake wars!

Caroline Kennedy

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TRANSCRIPT

GWEN IFILL: Now to my interview with the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy.

While conflicts in the Mideast and Ukraine have dominated the headlines, Japan has been coping with its own.

Caroline Kennedy was greeted warmly when she arrived in Tokyo last year. But the region, overshadowed by conflicts in the rest of the world, is a troubled one. At sea, Japan, Russia and China continue to feud over who controls islands they have fought over since World War II.

Kennedy ruffled diplomatic feathers early on when she suggested that an annual traditional dolphin hunt was inhumane. And Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came under fire from the U.S. and others for paying tribute at a shrine to Japanese war dead that Koreans and Chinese consider offensive.

But as Abe pushes for structural and constitutional reforms, the U.S. is offering its support, especially for a plan to allow Japan’s military to expand its role beyond self-defense.

SHINZO ABE, Prime Minister, Japan (through interpreter): I have the heavy responsibility as the prime minister to protect the livelihoods of our citizens. Taking that into account, this cabinet resolution will help to begin preparations for laying the framework of a new security legislation.

GWEN IFILL: Abe’s plan has not been popular among the Japanese, who fear they will be drawn into other nation’s conflicts. President Obama visited Japan in April, stressing that he has not abandoned the so-called pivot to Asia he promised early in his presidency.

Left on the front lines of that pivot is the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy. I spoke with her earlier today at the State Department.

Welcome, Ambassador Kennedy.

CAROLINE KENNEDY, U.S. Ambassador to Japan: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: When you first arrived in Japan, you were greeted by throngs of people cheering you in the streets. Has that died down?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Yes.

Actually, I wasn’t expecting it, but I think it was an incredibly moving kind of tribute to the place that America holds in the Japanese hearts.

GWEN IFILL: You said at the time that when you — you were arriving in Japan at a critical time in history for both countries. What are the critical issues that face you right now?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think it’s hard to really appreciate fully here at home, when there’s so much going on in the rest of the world as well, how important Japan is as an ally of the United States.

And pretty much everything we do around the world, Japan is really one of our closest, if not our closest, partner. And that includes our economic relationship, our political and security relationship. Asia represents 40 percent of the world’s GDP, so this is a region that is critical to America’s future.

And we need allies and partners, and Japan is really our number one. They’re a democracy. They’re the world’s number three economy. They are absolutely committed to the U.S./Japan alliance. And we do all kinds of other things, like monitor climate change and greenhouse gases with them, scientific exploration, and student exchange.

So it’s really across the board. So there are complicated issues right now, but there are also these longstanding kind of relationships that I think are so important for the United States to build on.

GWEN IFILL: I want to get back to those complicated issues right now, but you mentioned first that there’s so much else going on in the world. We are preoccupied with what’s happening in the Middle East, what’s happening in Ukraine. I can name a half-a-dozen other hot spots before I even get to Japan.

CAROLINE KENNEDY: That’s good.

(LAUGHTER)

GWEN IFILL: Well, whatever happened to the big Asia pivot, the transpacific partnership?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: The Asia pivot, rebalance I think is really how people see it, is absolutely happening, and I think that it’s having a major impact on the region.

The president’s visit was so important, and he visited our treaty partners Japan and Korea, who are two of our strongest allies in the world, as well as the Philippines and Malaysia, announced new agreements with the Philippines.

So I think that the U.S. presence in Asia is one of the reasons why it is so stable and prosperous. And that’s been true for the last 50 years, and it’s because people have worked at this.

GWEN IFILL: In Japan, if there is any nervousness in the region, it’s about China and it is about North Korea. Let’s just talk about China first and the territorial disputes involved in the islands there. Where does that stand today?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think, as you point out, it’s increasingly tense, and I think that — but there’s an effort being made, especially by Japan, to really open channels of communication, to set sort of safe maritime security practices, to resist the kind of destabilizing attempts to change the status quo.

So I think that Japan would like to have a hot line with China. They are really taking this very seriously. They train. They approach this very responsibly. They debate this. They’re very transparent with other countries in the region, so I think that everybody is really looking to Japan to be a helpful, solid leader on these issues.

GWEN IFILL: But still a fair amount of tension with the idea that China is on the rise.

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, China is certainly on the rise, but I think that China benefits a great deal from the U.S./Japan alliance. It’s one of the things that’s kept the region peaceful and prosperous and allowed their economy to grow.

GWEN IFILL: Japan agreed to turn over its weapons-grade plutonium, something the U.S. really wanted them to do, yet North Korea, nuclear-armed North Korea, still looms.

How do you justify their cooperation when they have such an existential threat so close to them?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think Japan is as committed as we are to denuclearizing North Korea.

This is a threat to all countries, and I think that we all work very closely to eliminate the North Korea nuclear threat.

GWEN IFILL: Are their conversations under way with South Korea or with other nations in the region about how to do that?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Oh, constantly.

It’s something that our government takes incredibly seriously. The Japanese government takes it equally seriously, and as do the South Koreans. So, this is something that is really front and center in the region, is the provocative and just — and dangerous behavior of the North Koreans.

GWEN IFILL: How are the concerns about what’s happening in the Middle East especially, and in Ukraine, and in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and in Iran, how does that play out in Japan? Is that something which people are watching with a wary eye or is it something that just seems terribly far away?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: This is something that the Japanese are watching very, very carefully.

And, obviously, they have said they are with us on sanctions. They are with us. They are part of the G7. This is something that they are taking very seriously. And they are partners with us in a much broader way. They are partners with us in development, in humanitarian assistance in the Middle East, in Syria, in the Ukraine. They have just contributed. They are the number one donor to Afghanistan after us.

GWEN IFILL: One of the things that Prime Minister Abe has been trying to do is to change the constitution to allow Japan to take better part or greater — play a greater role in these multinational efforts in these regions we’re talking about.

Right now, the constitution allows only for self-defense. Japanese people have not reacted very well to that, even though the U.S. has encouraged it.

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think it’s going to allow them to participate in peacekeeping, and to help the United States, and so — and to protect the United States when we’re doing joint operations.

And so I think it’s something that’s a big change. The rhetoric, it’s a very complicated and confusing issue. It’s going to be legislation and it’s going to be fully debated. The initial debate happened in the spring, but there are going to be much more extensive debates. And I think that’s one of the things that we should all look to, is this is a democratic society who is going to debate this fully.

GWEN IFILL: Are you necessarily on the sidelines in that kind of debate?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, this is a Japanese issue for the Japanese people.

GWEN IFILL: As a woman ambassador, one of your goals in arriving in Japan was to raise the status or address the status of women as professionals and equal parts of the economy in Japan. Have you been able to do that?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think the prime minister has really put this front and center.

And there’s a national debate going on in Japan right now about this, and I think the business community, as well as the Japanese public, sees this as an economic issue for their future. And empowering women is absolutely critical for the Japanese future.

And so I think it’s a really exciting time to be the first woman American ambassador, because there’s so much debate, there’s so many proposals, there’s so much going on, and there’s so much — there are so many talented women there, so it’s going to be great.

GWEN IFILL: Has your celebrity and every — all that comes with that, has it been a help or a hindrance, as ambassador?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think people have been incredibly welcoming, and I think it’s really been also very moving for me to see how much they admire America, but also President Kennedy and the ideals of public service and patriotism that he stood for.

GWEN IFILL: Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, thank you very much.

CAROLINE KENNEDY: Thank you.

Missing Light

Galaxies like M106 are not emitting enough light to produce the levels of ionised hydrogen that scientists have spotted.  Photo: REUTERS/Nasa

By Sarah Knapton www.telegraph.co.uk 9:50AM BST 09 Jul 2014

The universe is a pretty dark place – but according to astrophysicists it is much too dark.

Scientists have been left scratching their heads after noticing there is a huge deficit of light.

The amount of light in the universe can be measured accurately by studying tendrils of hydrogen which become ionised, or charged, when they encounter ultraviolet light.

The more ionised hydrogen you can spot, the more light should exist.

But, according to a new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the hydrogen tendrils suggest there is far more ultraviolet light around than is being emitted by galaxies and quasars.

An astonishing five times too much, in fact, and it is leading astrophysicists to speculate that the photons could be coming from an "exotic new source", or even decaying dark matter.

It means that 80 per cent of light in the universe is effectively missing.

“It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt light bulbs,” noted Carnegie’s Juna Kollmeier, lead author of the study. “Where is all that light coming from? It’s missing from our census.”

Intriguingly, the mismatch only appears in the nearby, relatively well-studied cosmos.

When telescopes focus on galaxies billions of light-years away (and therefore are viewing the universe billions of years in its past), everything seems to add up.

The fact that this accounting works in the early universe but falls apart locally has scientists puzzled.

The light in question consists of highly energetic ultraviolet photons that are able to convert electrically neutral hydrogen atoms into electrically charged ions.

The two known sources for such ionizing photons are quasars - powered by hot gas falling onto supermassive black holes over a million times the mass of the Sun - and the hottest young stars.

Observations indicate that the ionizing photons from young stars are almost always absorbed by gas in their host galaxy, so they never escape to affect intergalactic hydrogen. But the number of known quasars is far lower than needed to produce the required light.

“Either our accounting of the light from galaxies and quasars is very far off, or there’s some other major source of ionizing photons that we’ve never recognized,” Kollmeier said.

“We are calling this missing light the photon underproduction crisis. But it’s the astronomers who are in crisis -- somehow or other, the universe is getting along just fine.”

The anomaly emerged from comparing supercomputer simulations of intergalactic gas to the most recent analysis of observations from Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

“The simulations fit the data beautifully in the early universe, and they fit the local data beautifully if we’re allowed to assume that this extra light is really there,” said Ben Oppenheimer a co-author of the study from the University of Colorado.

“It’s possible the simulations do not reflect reality, which by itself would be a surprise, because intergalactic hydrogen is the component of the universe that we think we understand the best.”

“The most exciting possibility is that the missing photons are coming from some exotic new source, not galaxies or quasars at all,” said Neal Katz a co-author from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

For example, the mysterious dark matter, which holds galaxies together but has never been seen directly, could itself decay and ultimately be responsible for this extra light.

“You know it’s a crisis when you start seriously talking about decaying dark matter,” Katz added.

“The great thing about a 400 per cent discrepancy is that you know something is really wrong,” said co-author David Weinberg of the Ohio State University.

“We still don’t know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn’t true.”

J1531+3414

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two galaxies 
from the cluster SDSS J1531+3414.

Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and Grant Tremblay (European Southern Observatory)

By Mike Wall  space.com  |   July 10, 2014 05:40pm  ET

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a strange celestial "string of pearls" wrapped around the hearts of two merging elliptical galaxies.

The curly string is about 100,000 light-years long and sports blue "pearls" — actually huge young star clusters — every 3,000 light-years along the way, researchers said. You can zoom in on the beautiful structure, and learn more about it, in this new Hubble video:

"We were surprised to find this stunning morphology," study leader Grant Tremblay, of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, said in a statement. "We've long known that the 'beads on a string' phenomenon is seen in the arms of spiral galaxies and in tidal bridges between interacting galaxies. However, this particular supercluster arrangement has never been seen before in giant merging elliptical galaxies."

The two colliding galaxies, which lie within a cluster known as J1531+3414, are both about 330,000 light-years wide, researchers said. (For comparison, the disk of our own Milky Way spans about 100,000 light-years.)

An image by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a 100,000-light-year-long 
structure that resembles a string of pearls twisted into a corkscrew shape, 
winding around the cores of two massive galaxies. The "pearls" are actually 
superclusters of blazing, blue-white, newborn stars.

Credit: NASA/ESA

Their merger has sparked an intense burst of star formation, resulting in the creation of the clusters of young, blue stars. The physics behind the string-of-pearls structure are similar to the processes that cause rain to fall in drops as opposed to steady streams, researchers said.

It's unclear where the cold gas that's fueling the star formation came from. It may have existed all along within the two merging galaxies, or it may have condensed from the bubble of superhot plasma surrounding the duo, perhaps cooling out of the shock wave created by the cosmic collision, researchers said.

"Whatever the origin for this star-forming gas is, the result is awesome," Tremblay said. "It's very exciting. You can't find a mundane explanation for this."

The bright blue arcs surrounding the galaxy cluster in the new Hubble photo are light from distant galaxies, which the cluster's powerful gravity has warped into strange patterns, researchers said.