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Good Parents or Good Workers? draws upon new ethnographic studies and longitudinal interviews that are reporting on the daily lives of women and children under new welfare policy pressures. Contributors look at family policy in the context of daily demands and critique new social programs that are designed to strengthen families. The book is divided into three course-friendly sections that deal with the impact of welfare reform on caregiving, the lived experiences of low-income families, and family policy debates. Good Parents or Good Workers? is an important text on the impacts of welfare reform that will be essential reading in a variety of courses in education, sociology, and politics

Outlines two perspectives on the respective roles of families & preschools in socializing & educating young children. The family-oriented perspective emphasizes the primacy of parents as educators, moral guides, & nurturers of their children. The early childhood education perspective is more likely to view preschools as independent of the family. This perspective highlights the scientific basis of the early socialization enterprise & emphasizes research on universal developmental sequences. These two perspectives yield distinct responses to important policy questions about child care. Those with a family-oriented perspective advocate obtaining descriptive accounts of parents' goals, values, & practices & creating child care choices that reflect these considerations. Early childhood education advocates are concerned about promoting universal guidelines based on professional expertise to ensure high quality & feel that parents will select this care if given appropriate education concerning its value to their young children. It is argued that attempts to improve quality & increase supply must integrate the culturally based preferences of parents with knowledge about universal developmental processes gleaned from research & practice. 59 References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractA variety of civic actors—government, associations, and local agencies—work to help parents advance the vitality of our youngest children. Empirical findings accumulating over the past half‐century identify benefits for infants and toddlers stemming from three policy models: paid leave for parents after a newborn arrives; regular pediatric assessments, including home visiting; and quality caregivers situated in homes or centers. We review what is known about the effects of these policies, along with constituent elements of quality (mediators) that operate proximal to children's health, cognitive, and emotional growth. Much has been learned about how such collective action, carried out by local organizations, advance infant–toddler development. Methodological advances foster new knowledge: moving closer to causal inferences and pinpointing social mechanisms that enrich infant–toddler settings. Less well understood is how policy levers can move the malleable elements of program quality to raise the magnitude or sustainability of program effects. We note the benefits of income‐support efforts for fragile families, while urging new work on how economic dynamics touch the capacity of parents and caregivers to better nurture infants and toddlers.

The state has experimented with a range of decentralized school organizations over the past half century, in part aiming to lift poor children. This movement stems from not only neoliberal ideology but also from the earlier "Third Way" of advancing public projects—severing local organizing from the state's bureaucratic rules, while stopping short of atomized market remedies. This article first examines the economic and institutional forces that drive civic activists to advance decentralizing remedies, especially the spread of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and client choice in the education sector. We then detail the uneven empirical benefits of three decentralizing segments of the education sector: preschools, parental vouchers, and charter schools. Finally we move beneath surface-level governance changes to highlight how particular social relations found inside decentralized organizations at times do yield discernible, even sizable, benefits. Comparative cases reveal a second generation of decentralists, who build from the lessons of their policy ancestors. Second-wave decentralists are keenly focused on a social architecture that motivates poor children and educators.

Charter schools place competitive pressure on school districts to retain students and public funding. Many districts also have moved to decentralize control of budgets and teacher hiring down to school principals, independent of competitive pressures. But almost no evaluation evidence gauges the effectiveness of charter-like schools, relative to traditional public schools. We find that autonomous pilot schools in Los Angeles enroll more low-income and Spanish-speaking students, compared with traditional schools. Pilot pupils are significantly less likely to exit the school district. But pilot pupils displayed lower test scores in mathematics and fell slightly below traditional students in English-language arts, taking into account prior performance and their propensity to enter pilot schools. We tracked 6,732 students entering pilot high schools between 2008 and 2012, statistically matched in multiple ways with traditional peers from identical sending middle schools. We discuss the advantages of our evaluation strategy and the implications of our findings for education leaders and policy makers.

Most societies place great faith in the modern school's power to offer children a more prosperous future, from better jobs to wider social opportunities. In turn, political leaders around the world push to expand western forms of schooling, creating more slots for children, from preschool through university levels

AbstractAs welfare‐to‐work reforms increase women's labor market attachment, the lives of their young children are likely to change.
This
note draws on a random‐assignment experiment in Connecticut to ask whether mothers' rising employment levels and program participation
are
associated with changes in young children's early learning and cognitive growth. Children of mothers who entered Connecticut's Jobs First
program, an initiative with strict 21‐month time limits and work incentives, displayed moderate advantages in their early learning, compared
with those in a control group. A number of potential mechanisms for this effect are explored, including maternal employment and income, home
environment, and child care. Mothers in the new welfare program are more likely to be employed, have higher income, are less likely to be married,
have
more children's books in their home, and take their children to libraries and museums more frequently. However, these effects explain little of
the observed gain in child outcomes. Other parenting practices and the home's social environment do explain early learning, but these remained
unaffected by welfare reform. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management