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Poverty in the United States is worse than it was 30 years ago when the original Kerner Commission Report was issued: The poor get poorer even in the midst of a U.S. economic boom, the country is resegregating, and poor African-Americans and Hispanics are becoming concentrated in cities from which it is even harder to escape. This book shows what works and what doesn't in dealing with these problems and offers practical policy recommendations for changing America's present course.
This provocative book asks a simple question: since we know that middle class schools tend to work best, why not give every child in America the opportunity to attend a public school in which the majority of students come from middle class households? Economically integrated schools, the author argues, will do far more to promote achievement and equal opportunity than vouchers, standards, class size reduction, or any of the other leading education proposals on the left and right that seek to make "separate but equal" schools work. Building on two recent education trends—the decline in racial desegregation as a legal tool and the movement toward greater public school choice—All Together Now provides a blueprint for creating schools that educate children from various backgrounds under one roof. Concurring with the concerns of voucher proponents about the unfairness of trapping poor kids in failing schools, the book provides a practical, viable, and legally sound plan for promoting economic and racial integration among public schools.
What do children need to grow and develop? And how can their needs be met when parents work? Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through the maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work:,Allow parents more flexibility to take time off work for family responsibilities;,Break the link between employment and essential family benefits;,Give mothers and fathers more options to stay home in the first year of life;,Improve quality of care from infancy through the preschool years;,Increase access to high-quality out-of-school programs for school-aged children and teenagers.
Taming the Sharks: Towards a Cure for the High Cost Credit Market chronicles the historic, economic. legal, and political factors breeding America's feverish high cost debt industry. The ideas presented are novel, progressive, and controversial. Historians have long argued that interest rates provide a sort of economic and political health of nations. If true, the contemporary American market for credit shows troubling signs of distress. While Federal Reserve Board monetary policy has kept commercial and prime consumer interest rates low, the past two decades have seen explosive growth in an industry specializing in high-cost consumer debt. Payday loan outlet chains, automobile title loan co...
Blood Stories focuses on menarche as a central aspect of body politics in contemporary US society, emphasizing that women are integrated into the social and sexual order through the body. Using oral and written narratives of 104 diverse women, the authors address the central question of how menarche as a bodily event signifying womanhood takes on cultural significance in a society that devalues women. Exploring issues of contamination and concealment and the sexualization of women's bodies that occurs at menarche, the authors emphasize how the politics of gender are negotiated on/through women's bodies.
The impact of long-term longitudinal studies on the landscape of twentieth century social and behavioral science cannot be overstated. The field of life course studies has grown exponentially since its inception in the 1950s, and now influences methodologies as well as expectations for all academic research. Looking at Lives offers an unprecedented "insider's view" into the intentions, methods, and findings of researchers engaged in some of the 20th century's landmark studies. In this volume, eminent American scholars—many of them pioneers in longitudinal studies—provide frank and illuminating insights into the difficulties and the unique scientific benefits of mounting studies that trac...
Work first. That is the core idea behind the 1996 welfare reform legislation. It sounds appealing, but according to Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better, it collides with an exceptionally difficult reality. The degree to which work provides a way out of poverty depends greatly on the ability of low-skilled people to maintain stable employment and make progress toward an income that provides an adequate standard of living. This forward-looking volume examines eight areas of the safety net where families are falling through and describes how current policies and institutions could evolve to enhance the self-sufficiency of low-income families. David Neumark analyzes a range of labor mar...
How are we to understand the complex forces that shape human behavior? A variety of diverse perspectives, drawing upon studies of human behavioral ontogeny, as well as humanity's evolutionary herit age seem to provide the best likelihood of success. It is in the attempt to synthesize such potentially disparate approaches to human develop ment into an integrated whole that we undertake this series on the Genesis of Behavior. In many respects, the incredible burgeoning of research in child development the last or like a lines over decade two seems thousand of inquiry spreading outward in an incoherent starburst of effort. The need exists to provide, on an ongoing basis, an arena of discourse w...
Poverty declined significantly in the decade after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 declaration of "War on Poverty." Dramatically increased federal funding for education and training programs, social security benefits, other income support programs, and a growing economy reduced poverty and raised expectations that income poverty could be eliminated within a generation. Yet the official poverty rate has never fallen below its 1973 level and remains higher than the rates in many other advanced economies. In this book, editors Maria Cancian and Sheldon Danziger and leading poverty researchers assess why the War on Poverty was not won and analyze the most promising strategies to reduce poverty in the twen...