Sex education has been a controversial subject for decades as public school officials and parents have debated the best ways to help teenagers avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Not all states require schools to teach sex ed. But many states require sex education instructors to discuss or stress abstinence from sexual activity, with some schools offering abstinence-only programming, which urges kids to wait until marriage and often excludes information about contraceptives.

This tip sheet, originally published in 2018, has been updated to include more recent statistics and additional information.

Covering white supremacy is a difficult job that requires newsrooms to weigh the value of providing the public with information with the risk of promoting or glamorizing the ideas and actions of right-wing extremists.

As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 census, news outlets nationwide will be working to help the public understand the importance and impact of the once-every-10-years population count.

To help journalists bolster their coverage, we reached out to two experts — a research professor at George Washington University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau — to ask them to point out weaknesses in and ways newsrooms can improve their census coverage. They offered great feedback.

Individual perception — for example, how people feel they are doing financially compared with others — often doesn’t jibe with reality.

Economic mobility is one area where beliefs solidify absent information. Research shows that Americans are chronically under-informed about the size of the economic inequality gap in the U.S. That leads people to think they are more economically mobile than they really might be. And misperception can impact policy.



More than 1 in 4 people living in the United States has a mental or physical disability, according to a 2018 report from the Census Bureau, which collected the data in 2014.

Policies and positions can shift over time. But when it comes to where America’s legislators invest their personal money, turns out they stick pretty firmly to their ideological ground, according to research newly published in Management Science.

Amid the United States’ heavily documented opioid crisis, the nation is dealing with another, lesser known rise in substance use. In recent years, national rates of cocaine use have steadily climbed.