A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, Bosses Must Be Creative, focuses on the Future of Children’s Work and Family volume, highlighting the challenges of balancing family and work responsibilities today, and calling for workplace flexibility policies to ease the burden.
Author Archives: Lauren Moore
Workplace Flexibility as Anti-Poverty Strategy
Under pressure to balance their budgets, states are cutting government subsidies that help pay for child care as reported on December 13 in The New York Times. The reduction threatens the wellbeing of families by making it more difficult for parents to maintain their jobs while caring for their children. One option to offset the impact of such cuts may lie in increased provisions of workplace flexibility.
Research included in the Future of Children’s Work and Family volume, released by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution, finds workplace flexibility is linked with engagement, satisfaction, retention, and better health for employees; and higher productivity and a better “bottom line” for employers. The volume also shows that providing short to moderate periods of paid parental leave – from three to twelve months – for all workers is unlikely to have negative repercussions in the labor market and is likely to have positive benefits for child and family wellbeing.
In a global comparison, the data presented in the volume suggest that guaranteeing paid parental leave as well as paid leave when a child is sick is feasible for the United States without jeopardizing its competitive economy or low unemployment rates in the future. And perhaps contrary to popular opinion, the volume shows that when employees are offered workplace flexibility, they tend to use it conservatively, minimizing costs to employers.
“Allowing employees more control over their hours and more flexibility to adjust hours or work location when family demands arise can lead to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention,” say issue editors Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University. “Far from representing a cost to employers, such policies, if well designed to take into account the needs of both employers and employees, can yield benefits.”
Paid leave and workplace flexibility policies are particularly important for low-income workers, who are the least likely to have access to flexibility policies. For these families, taking care of their families can put their wages – and their jobs – at risk. Because current welfare policies encourage low-income parents to work, workplace policies that encourage job retention should follow.
In the face of unprecedented federal government budget strains, the volume recommends initiatives with minimal costs and maximum benefits. Namely, the volume recommends that state and local governments pass paid leave initiatives (Connecticut recently became the first state to require employers to provide paid sick leave); that employers implement workplace flexibility policies that encourage “right to request” and “compensatory time”; and that community organizations think carefully about the ways they can adjust their work to better accommodate working families by, for example, changing the hours they are open or providing better coordination of care.
Smaller Families Mean Fewer Siblings to Care for Mom and Dad
Barbara Ray’s Psychology Today piece, Smaller Families Mean Fewer Siblings to Care for Mom and Dad focuses on the Future of Children’s Work and Family volume, highlighting the challenges of balancing elder care and work responsibilities today, and calling for workplace flexibility policies to ease the burden.
Paid Sick Leave Gaining Momentum
On October 21, the Center for American Progress hosted an event co-sponsored by Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Woman & Families focused on expanding paid sick days coverage.
The Future of Children’s Work and Family volume, which was distributed to attendees at the event, recommends that a minimal amount of paid sick leave be provided to workers. The status quo, whereby the lowest-paid workers are least likely to have paid sick leave or other leave that enables them to take care of family responsibilities, forces working parents to choose between not taking care of their family or losing their wages (or losing their job altogether).
This past spring, Connecticut passed S.B. 913, the Paid Sick Leave bill, which made the state the country’s first to pass a law requiring paid sick days for service employees. Although many salaried workers have paid sick days in their contract, the same does not apply to 80 percent of low-wage workers in Connecticut.
“This discussion is about hourly workers at the lower end of the scale who are the most vulnerable,” said Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy.
Panelists argued that the law promotes increases in health, cuts business costs by reducing risks associated with employees coming to work while sick, garners bi-partisan support, and is not abused by employees.
For more information on the event at the Center for American Progress go to:
http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2011/10/paidsickdays.html
To read the Future of Children’s Work and Family volume and policy brief go to:
www.futureofchildren.org
Building a Grassroots Movement: Taking Workplace Flexibility From Private to Public
Future of Children Work and Family volume author Kathleen Christensen, Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, writes about workplace flexibility in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-e-christensen/workplace-flexibility_b_1021717.html
Workplace Flexibility: The Next Anti-Poverty Strategy
In conjunction with National Work and Family month, on Wednesday, October 5, Princeton-Brookings released a new volume of the Future of Children entitled Work and Family.
“The dilemma that we face is that parents act as the hub of service delivery for their children and elderly relatives. They provide direct care themselves, and they also coordinate other care that their family members receive… But most parents and most elder caregivers are also employed, and that leads to work-family conflict,” opened issue editor Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University at the Brookings Institution event.
Three demographic changes have increased work-family conflicts for both mothers and fathers: mothers’ continued entry into the workforce, high divorce rates, and the growing elderly population. And unlike other nations with advanced economies, the U.S. has very modest government policies requiring employers to give their workers benefits such as paid family leave and child care. The United States federal government provides only unpaid leave – and only for some parents – to care for newborns or sick family members and most parents do not qualify for government child care programs.
Work and Family shows that providing short to moderate periods of paid parental leave (from three to twelve months) for all workers, is likely to have positive benefits for child and family wellbeing, and is unlikely to have negative repercussions in the labor market. It also explains the ways that increasing access to high-quality early childhood education and care could ease work-family conflicts and promote sizable gains in school readiness for disadvantaged children.
But, given the difficult state of the American economy and the large, growing federal deficit, what can we realistically expect from federal policy makers in this area?
Rather than focus on broad policy change, discussions at the Brookings Institution event focused on the role that state and local governments, as well as employers, might play in helping families deal with the demands of work, namely, by promoting workplace flexibility.
“Allowing employees more control over their hours and more flexibility to adjust hours or work location when family demands arise can lead to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention. Far from representing a cost to employers, such policies, if well designed to take into account the needs of both employers and employees, can yield benefits,” notes Work and Family, a finding which was echoed at Brookings by Ernst & Young’s Flexibility Strategy Leader Maryella Gockel and volume author and Co-Founder and President of the Families and Work Institute Ellen Galinsky.
Unfortunately, as Galinsky, Waldfogel, and Brookings’ Ron Haskins all mentioned, low-income employees, who often have the greatest need for workplace flexibility, generally have the least access to it.
Heather Boushey, volume author and Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress, took this point further, suggesting that workplace flexibility is the ‘next step’ in anti-poverty policy.
“We did all that work on welfare reform in the 1990’s,” said Boushey, “that encouraged low income individuals, especially women, to work… and so [workplace flexibility] must be the next step, right? We want that single Mom in the workplace, but we have to make sure that she can stay in the workplace, that she can hold on to her job while taking care of her children.” Employer flexibility policies that allow parents flexible time off when children are sick, paid sick leave when parents themselves are sick, and leave arrangements for the birth of a child can help low-income individuals maintain their income, and hopefully head off poverty.
Employers can enact such policies voluntarily and relatively quickly. The Families and Work Institute provides guidelines that can help guide employers as they implement workplace flexibility: http://familiesandwork.org/site/work/workforce/main.html.
And there is also a role for local and state policy makers to play. Over the past few months, even in the depths of this recession, paid sick days were enacted into law in the state of Connecticut, in the city of Seattle, and passed in the city of Philadelphia (although not yet signed by the mayor).
For more information on the volume, go to: www.futureofchildren.org. Click here for a full transcript of the Brookings Institution event.
Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites
According to a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center, “More Latino children are living in poverty–6.1 million in 2010–than children of any other racial or ethnic group. This marks the first time in U.S. history that the single largest group of poor children is not white. In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Latino, 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black.”
Prior to 2007, more white children lived in poverty than Hispanic children. But the Great Recession hit the Hispanic population particularly hard. Poverty rates between 2007 and 2010 increased by 36.3% for Hispanic children. Comparable rates during this time period for whites and blacks increased by 17.6% and 11.7%, respectively.
Of the 6.1 million Latino children living in poverty, more than two-thirds (4.1 million) are the children of immigrant parents. And, as noted in the Future of Children’s Immigrant Children volume and policy brief, a substantial percentage of these children are falling behind in school. More than 5 million, for example, struggle with their academic subjects because they are still learning English.
Evidence shows that three policy reforms -increased attendance in quality preschool, improved instruction in English, and increased attendance in postsecondary education -would improve the school achievement of Hispanic youth, lift their economic wellbeing as adults, and increase their economic and social contributions to American society.
Latin American immigrants arrive in the United States with a strong work ethic and strong family values. By the second generation, their work rates decline, their wage progress appears to slow, and both their nonmarital birth rates and their divorce rates rise. Finding ways to boost achievement and help more Latinos complete high school and attend and complete college or other postsecondary training should be high on the nation’s list of priorities.
As Pew Center Associate Director Mark Hugo Lopez commented in the New York Times “Who [Hispanic children] become will be important for the future of the nation.”
For more specific information about the Future of Children’s recommendations for children of immigrant families, see our Immigrant Children volume.
Few Youths to be Deported in New Policy
The Obama administration announced Thursday that it will suspend deportation proceedings against many illegal immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety, said the New York Times.
Senator Richard Durbin, the chief proponent of the DREAM Act (the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) in the Senate, believes that the new policy will stop the deportation of most illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school, and want to go to college or join the armed forces – those who would qualify for relief under the DREAM Act.
As explained in the Future of Children’s Immigrant Children volume and policy brief, the DREAM Act, first introduced in Congress in 2001, would give certain undocumented students the opportunity both to attend college and to become citizens by following a two-step process. The first step gives undocumented youth a conditional legal status that allows them to work or attend school without fear of deportation. To qualify, youth must be enrolled in a two-year or four-year college or in trade school, have a high school diploma or General Educational Development credential, have been in the United States continuously for at least five years, have good moral character, and meet a few other requirements. Then, in the second step, youth would have up to six years to apply to upgrade their status to legal permanent resident (LPR), which in turn would allow them to apply for citizenship. To upgrade their status to LPR and eventually citizenship, immigrant youth would be required, among other things, to maintain good moral character and complete at least two years of college, trade school, or military service. During the second step, the youth would be eligible for federal student loans and some other benefits, but not Pell grants (the major source of federal grant funds for low-income college students) or welfare benefits.
In 2010, the DREAM Act’s most recent congressional run, it passed the House but was defeated in the Senate, when supporters could not muster the sixty votes needed to end a filibuster. The major arguments against the act are that it would reward illegal behavior (unauthorized entry to the United States) by granting what opponents call “amnesty,” allow “criminal aliens” to become citizens, cost taxpayers money by allowing some federal and state funds to be spent on undocumented immigrants and thereby deprive some citizens of educational benefits, and allow aliens granted LPR status the right to bring their relatives to the United States. Opponents also argue that by rewarding unauthorized entry, the act would encourage future illegal entry to the United States.
Perhaps the two strongest arguments in favor of the DREAM Act are that giving people a chance based on academic achievement and good behavior is the American way and that the act will help immigrant youth by boosting their education and will help the nation by allowing it to recoup the investments it has made in their K-12 education.
Under the new initiative outlined in the Times, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, can provide relief, on a case-by-case basis, to young people who are in the country illegally but pose no threat to national security or to the public safety. Although not nearly as comprehensive as the DREAM Act or other legislative immigration reform, this policy could ease fears for undocumented immigrant youth who are pursuing productive education and employment, and contributing positively to the country’s wellbeing, while also strengthening the country’s focus on those illegal immigrants who pose real security threats.
English Language Learning: Best Practices for Children of Immigrant Families
Today the Washington Post highlighted the benefits of bilingualism for children. For parents, it is better to speak to young children in a native tongue than in a recently acquired language. Researchers who spoke at the Education Research Section’s practitioners’ conference, “Enhancing Practice for English Language Learners,” which presented findings from the Future of Children’s Immigrant Children volume, agreed.
As summarized in Melanie Wright’s coverage of the event, in addition to noting that English literacy needs to be taught early and taught well, researchers recommended that schools also show respect for a child’s native language and culture. One way to do this is by supporting the use of the native language at home. McGill University Professor Fred Genesee explained that this is not only important for socio-emotional development, but it is also important for enhancing second language acquisition. In fact, Genesee suggested that English language learners are actually able to learn English more quickly if they are literate in their native tongue. Instead of trying to get parents with limited English skills to speak English at home – which may hurt family communication – he recommended supporting their use of the native language in ways that push their children toward literacy. Multilingualism is a valuable asset that should be preserved and developed.
Second, the timing and quality of English language education was a non-controversial but oft-repeated theme. Princeton Professor Marta Tienda stressed the need for early English mastery in the opening talk, and RAND economist Lynn Karoly described linguistic and socioeconomic disadvantages that immigrant children face when they enter school. Both noted that intervention in the early years is both critical and achievable, as 78 percent of current English language learners are born in the United States. University of Texas Professor Rob Crosnoe stressed that the return on investment of teaching younger children is much higher, as building language skills becomes more difficult and costly with age and is less likely to result in fluency. While the need for quality education seems intuitive, speakers noted that many current approaches to teach English language learners miss the mark by assuming children “soak up language like a sponge.” This, Genesee declared, is a myth.
Third, speakers addressing professional development issues advocated making language learning a school goal rather than the purview of just English language learning teachers. To aid students, schools should integrate language education into their lessons, ensuring that students have the vocabulary and language skills needed for their content areas. Incorporating language themes into other school settings reinforces the lessons from English instruction. A key way to do this, according to Jennifer Himmel from the Center of Applied Linguistics, is to have teachers in “content areas” such as math and science set language goals for their students, something that can benefit the literacy development of native English speakers as well as those learning the language. Along with these recommendations, speakers also suggested ways to offer support and resources to the teaching community that can help them achieve these aims, from professional development to increasing collaboration between teachers and their administrations. Another component of fostering unity in a multilingual setting is reaching out to parents who may not speak English.
Finally, presenters addressed assessment issues. Professor Sandra Barrueco of the Catholic University of America stressed the importance of using multilingual measures that have been properly validated. She identified some frequent errors in the field (such as conducting one’s own translation or selecting other language measures out of convenience, familiarity, or because they appear adequate in English) and explained how these potentially lead to negative consequences, including misdiagnosis, program defunding, or inappropriate policy decisions. She and other speakers also discussed assessment issues in the classroom and broader school contexts.
This outreach event followed the release of the Future of Children’s latest volume, Immigrant Children, and was co-sponsored by the Future of Children and the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).
For more information about the conference as well as power point slides and videos, please visit http://www.futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/events/enhancing-practice-with-e/index.xml.
H.R. Bill to Strengthen Student Achievement Cites Future of Children
House of Representatives’ bill 2637 aims to strengthen student achievement and graduation rates and prepare young people for college, careers, and citizenship through innovative partnerships that meet the comprehensive needs of children and youth.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Judy Chu [D-CA32] (sponsor) and David Loebsack [D-IA2] (co-sponsor) on July 25, 2011, and cites the Future of Children saying “…. (5) An analysis of health problems, maternal child rearing practices, and the impact of such problems and practices on education published by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution estimates that differences in these factors may account for a quarter of the racial gap in school readiness…”
The Future of Children’s Volume on School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps goes on to highlight the promising strategy of increasing access to high-quality center-based early childhood education programs for poor three- and four-year-olds. Such a step would measurably boost the achievement of black and Hispanic children and narrow the school readiness gap, a priority noted in the bill ((6)1).
What should these programs look like?
High-quality Learning Environment: The education component must be high-quality, with small class sizes, a low teacher-pupil ratio, and teachers with bachelor degrees and training in early childhood education, using a curriculum that is cognitively stimulating. Not all of the child care centers and Head Start programs that now serve low-income children meet these standards.
Teacher Training: Teachers should be trained to identify children with moderate to severe behavioral problems and to work with these children to improve their emotional and social skills. Although such training is now being provided by some Head Start and some preschool programs, it is not available in most child care programs.
Parent Training: Parent training reinforces what teachers are doing in school to enhance children’s development. Examples include encouraging parents to read to children on a daily basis and teaching parents how to deal with behavior problems.
Home Visits: Staff should be available to identify health problems in children and to help parents get ongoing health care for their children. Including optional home visits would allow staff to further screen for serious mental health problems among parents or other behaviors that are not conducive to good child development. Although some Head Start programs and child care centers in low-income communities do link parents with health care services for their children, these programs do not include a home visit.
Integration: Finally, the new programs should be well aligned with the kindergarten programs that children will eventually attend so that the transition from preschool to kindergarten is successful for children, parents, and teachers.
High-quality early childhood programs such as these exist. The challenge for policymakers and practitioners is to extend the reach of these programs and make them available to low-income children, during a time of budget restraint and entitlement cuts. The return on public investment in high quality childhood education is substantial, and that should be considered when discussing the costs and benefits of budgetary changes.