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2423d46
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I have spent a lot of time, in America and abroad, covering the struggles of different groups to assert ownership over their societies and the consequences of their lack of it. And I am forever struck at how quickly ownership can change behaviors and enable adaptation, self-propulsion, resilience, and healthy interdependencies. In
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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66b83df
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In 2014, when the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa, it was the American military that sent in three thousand troops and $3 billion to wipe it out. There was no Russian or Chinese aid mission that jumped into the breach. Yes,
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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13f9a2b
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Megginson's dictum: "The civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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08a5451
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QI's research suggested that the quote emerged over time from a speech delivered by a Louisiana State University business professor, Leon C. Megginson, at the convention of the Southwestern Social Science Association in 1963. Megginson reportedly said: Yes, change is the basic law of nature. But the changes wrought by the passage of time affect individuals and institutions in different ways. According to Darwin's Origin of Species, it is no..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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d6d93eb
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As the Harvard University strategist Graham Allison summed it up: "Historically, there has always been a gap between people's individual anger and what they could do with their anger. But thanks to modern technology, and the willingness of people to commit suicide, really angry individuals can now kill millions of people if they can get the right materials." And that is becoming steadily easier with the globalization of flows and the rise o..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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f880657
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She would initiate three "races to the top" from the federal level--with prizes of $100 million, $75 million, and $50 million--to vastly accelerate innovations in social technologies: Which state can come up with the best platform for retraining workers? Which state can design a pilot city or community of the future where everything from self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous Wi-Fi to education, clean energy, affordable housing, health care, ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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e8fc62c
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In other words, he explained, unless we bear witness to God's presence by our own good deeds, He is not present.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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07eb3d0
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In the postbiblical world we understand that from the first day of the world, God trusted man to make choices, when He entrusted Adam to make the right decision about which fruit to eat in the Garden of Eden. We are responsible for making God's presence manifest by what we do, by the choices we make. And the reason this issue is most acute in cyberspace is that no one else is in charge there. There is no place in today's world where you enc..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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bc0bd92
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So, as I wrote in the paperback edition of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, I started telling anyone who asked "Is God in cyberspace?" that the answer is "no"--but He wants to be there. But only we can bring Him there by how we act there. God celebrates a universe with such human freedom because He knows that the only way He is truly manifest in the world is not if He intervenes but if we all choose sanctity and morality in an environment wher..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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6de5605
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As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their book, the four key measures of an economy's health (per capita GDP, labor productivity, the number of jobs, and median household income) all rose together for most of the Cold War years. "For more than three decades after World War II, all four went up steadily and in almost perfect lockstep," Brynjolfsson noted in a June 2015 interview with the Harvard Business Review. "Job growth a..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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8cac14d
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in October 2014, the United States was inundated with more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. "They're fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries," noted Vox.com, "where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north." Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environm..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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9d48493
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Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw mat..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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4c67968
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On June 20, 2016, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies, and UNHCR's own reporting, issued a report stating that a total of 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared with 59.5 million just twelve months earlier.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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b1923e8
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President Obama advocated in his Hiroshima speech: "What makes our species unique [is that] we're not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted. The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace."..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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55ba0d0
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With the steady drop in the price of renewable energy and efficiency, "it now costs the same to destroy the climate or save it," said Harvey. "The price is basically the same, but at the micro scale there will be different winners and losers." Coal and oil companies and traditional utilities will lose out. Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and efficient and distributed energy purveyors will win. "At the macro scale, though, the whole world will ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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abda4cf
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The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust--Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity--noted that "social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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0da42bf
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Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. "By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means," wrote Fukuyama. It"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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7a576c6
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Gates put it to me this way: "For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well--you need many pieces to get stability right." None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure--roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking--basic a..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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c2d2792
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Patience wasn't just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought." We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, "but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it."
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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b8396df
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We have never seen a time when more people could make history, record history, publicize history, and amplify history all at the same time," remarked Dov Seidman. In"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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9282b98
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But it is very difficult to persuade people to do something if you can't connect the dots for them in a convincing way--why this action will produce this result, because this is how the gears and pulleys of the Machine work. And,
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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4069de6
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Consider a New York Times story from April 22, 2014, that reported: Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves. Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers ... Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day--turning the pre..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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abf7bc7
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All I know is that since becoming a reporter in 1978, I have spent a lot of my career covering the difference between peoples, societies, leaders, and cultures focused on learning from "the other"--to catch up after falling behind--and those who feel humiliated by "the other," by their contact with strangers, and lash out rather than engage in the hard work of adaptation. This theme has so permeated my reporting that I have been tempted at ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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89a6e4e
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The story also pointed out that most big cities and towns have chambers of commerce and economic development offices, but what makes Itasca unique, participants say, is a commitment to hard data and McKinsey-style analysis, as well as a willingness to depart from the script that drives many private sector lobbies.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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1e347c8
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The sudden and massive influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East has overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the European Union and triggered a populist-nationalist backlash, while also prompting the EU to start limiting its policy of free movement of people between countries. The June 2016 British vote to withdraw from the EU was driven in no small degree by anti-immigration sentiment. And
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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3303698
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By studying the pattern of footsteps, the farmers were able to gain early detection of eight different cow diseases, enabling early treatment and improving the overall health and longevity of the herd. "A little ingenuity can transform even the oldest of industries like farming," concluded Sirosh. If" --
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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2f2d9e2
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The first line of defense for any society is always going to be its guardrails--laws, stoplights, police, courts, surveillance, the FBI, and basic rules of decency for communities like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All of those are necessary, but they are not sufficient for the age of accelerations. Clearly, what is also needed--and is in the power of every parent, school principal, college president, and spiritual leader--is to think mor..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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15f8629
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Obama added, is "to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race." I"
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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7a6d433
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Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society's political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the "pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group's hist..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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84747ba
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Tencent, and Alibaba, the flow of crowdfunding through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe,
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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1dc8ced
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Salesforce,
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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a963f90
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Beirut's enduring lesson for me was how thin is the veneer of civilization, how easily the ties that bind can unravel, how quickly a society that was known for generations as the Switzerland of the Middle East can break apart into a world of strangers. I have never looked at the world the same since I left Beirut. It was like catching a glimpse of the underside of a rock or the mess of wires and chips that are hidden inside a computer. Stev..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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e2c3960
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LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison,
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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5af47ef
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we cannot reverse these trends on our own; the will has to come from within these societies. But we can raise the odds that they will do it themselves by raising the number of people with the will to do so. What America and the West can do--and have not done nearly enough of--is to invest in and amplify the islands of decency and the engines of capacity-building in countries in, or bordering on, the World of Disorder. When we invest in the ..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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476432a
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Apple
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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9d6a6f7
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The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities, and it inspired the Beirutis and ultimately the Lebanese to believe that they could build a modern Arab republic, melding together seventeen different Christian, Muslim, and Druse sects.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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2d8b4ba
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In short, we have to face two fundamental facts about geopolitics today: Fact #1: The necessary is impossible. Fact #2: The impossible is necessary. That is, while we cannot repair the wide World of Disorder on our own, we also cannot just ignore it. It metastasizes in an interdependent world. If we don't visit the World of Disorder in the age of accelerations, it will visit us. This is especially true when you know that the age of accelera..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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3a34b18
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In the Cold War, Russia effectively occupied all of Eastern Europe, suppressing not only its freedoms but also its ethnic conflicts. For five centuries the Ottomans managed most of the Middle East in the same way. But today we live in a postimperial and a postcolonial world. No great power wants to occupy anybody. As we've seen, the major powers have all learned the hard way that when you occupy another country all that you win is a bill. I..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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8cf5ce8
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Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, made the case for why in an essay in The American Interest on July 10, 2016, entitled "When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism." "Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust ... Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for busi..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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8d64305
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The first and oldest of these traditions is tribe-like politics. I use the term "tribe-like" to refer to a pre-modern form of political interaction characterized by a harsh, survivalist quality and an adherence to certain intense primordial or kin-group forms of allegiance. Sometimes the tribe-like group that is in power in the Middle East, or is seeking power, is an actual tribe, sometimes it is a clan, members of a religious sect, a villa..
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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5c7d56e
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These alliances began with the most basic blood association--the family--and then expanded to the clan, the tribe, and then to other tribes.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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f5481f9
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NAZ was founded in 2008 in Minneapolis, and is modeled on Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. It uses a holistic web of family coaches and tutors, combined with academic and wraparound support, for 1,100 families, to keep 2,300 children in an education pipeline from early childhood to college.
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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50e4eba
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We work with both parents and their children to make lasting progress. Supporting the entire family to succeed is critically important, because when parents provide stable homes, their children are able to focus on learning. We
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Thomas L. Friedman |
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96a6d5d
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We also recognized that schools can't do it alone, so we surround students with a team that provides everything from extra academic opportunities, parent education, and early childhood services to behavioral health counseling, housing and career support. In partner schools where the supports are most layered for NAZ students, they are doing significantly better than their peers in reading. Samuels
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Thomas L. Friedman |