Author Archives: Melanie Fox

NYT Article about Extended Transition to Adulthood Misses Critical Issues about Disadvantaged Young People

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A recent New York Times Magazine article about today’s 20-something’s has gone viral, with countless electronically connected young people circulating the story about how their cohort is changing all the rules when it comes to transitioning to adulthood. They are in a sort of limbo, "forestalling the beginning of adult life," as they extend their schooling, jump between career paths, and delay marriage and childbearing. This article notes some of the cultural forces feeding this trend: a sluggish job market and the increasing need for post-secondary education in today’s workforce are two major reasons for the shift. But the article misses a critical part of the story: how have these changes affected low-income, disadvantaged young adults?

In fact, this elongated transition worsens already existing disparities between disadvantaged youth and their more educated, higher income counterparts.

Covered in detail in the latest volume of The Future of Children, the shift from childhood to full adulthood places great strain on both young people and their families. Although governmental programs provide some support for disadvantaged children, the burden falls primarily on private institutions or interpersonal networks for those 18 and older. Across the income spectrum, parents are spending about ten percent of their income to support young adult children, but ten percent of a lower or middle class income provides fewer opportunities than a comparable portion of an upper-middle or upper class family salary. Moreover, for a family already struggling financially, providing for an adult child can be very stressful.

More affluent parents may help children by offering them rent-free housing, monetary support, or a potential safety net while the children experiment with low-paying jobs or unpaid internships. In addition, they can help emerging adults establish themselves by providing loans or assistance towards buying a car or house. Such assets help young adults build up capital and transition more smoothly into stable careers and family life. Less wealthy parents may not be able to provide their children with the same advantages without incurring major costs. Their resources are more limited and available money may be less reliable from year-to-year. As a result, these more disadvantaged children may fall even further behind their peers.

In addition, parents assist their children by connecting them to other networks of support, including people who may help them advance their careers and institutions that facilitate transitions. One such institution is college. Private colleges, more heavily populated by more affluent youth, tend to offer extensive support to help students develop at least partial autonomy, such as on-campus housing, extensive activities and entertainment, adult and peer support, health care, and counseling or other resources to guide students into jobs and post-college life. Community colleges, which are more in reach for many lower-income families, offer their students far less support and far fewer opportunities, thus deepening disadvantages.

Another trend widening the gap between young people is the timing of having children. While young people spanning the socioeconomic range are marrying later, less affluent young people are forming families while still in their late teens and early twenties, often outside of marriage. The responsibilities that accompany parenthood – from medical needs to childcare – pose additional challenges to completing an education and maintaining a steady job. To make matters worse, many young, unmarried parents break up shortly after their child is born, and young mothers often turn to their own mothers for help. Middle and upper class youth that wait until married with a stable career to have children are much better equipped to handle these additional costs and demands without relying on overburdened families. Without parents or public programs that can assist them, more disadvantaged youth continue to struggle with the assumption of adult roles.

As this widely-experienced yet new phase of maturation becomes more studied and understood, effort needs to be made to make sure that those emerging adults who are already disadvantaged – from impoverished families, with weak family ties, exiting foster care, requiring special education, or leaving the juvenile justice system – do not fall further behind. Whether by expanding social services beyond age eighteen or increasing the counseling and lifestyle support aspects of community college, society must help provide 20-somethings the assistance they need to transition into healthy, productive adult lives.

Financial Aid and Counseling Increase Community College Completion

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In a recent New York Times article, experts conclude that an academic post-secondary experience may not be for everyone and that for some youth, vocational training might be a better fit. While access to and preparation for college remain important goals for many youth, Bob Lerman suggests that more emphasis should be put on high school, post-secondary, and apprenticeship programs to give some options to youth who do not pursue college but still must be prepared to enter the workforce. Community colleges are one place that offers vocational training programs.
While enrollment in such programs has gone up in recent years, however, an article in The Future of Children’s issue on Transition to Adulthood points out that many students struggle to stay in school and attain degrees and certificates. Students often face competing pressures on their time, such as work and family obligations, and these institutions often lack adequate resources to support such students.
More research needs to be done on how to best assist students, but a couple areas that seem promising are better, more personal counseling and more effective provision of financial aid. Early results from a randomized control trial of struggling students at a community college in California showed that a mandatory program on skills such as time management and note-taking coupled with counseling and tutoring requirements boosted academic performance and course credits earned. Some less rigorous evaluations also suggest that individualized programs helping students adjust to the demands of community college increased their success.
Financial aid studies have looked at both sources providing money upon enrollment and those offering stipends as rewards for achievement once in school. Recent legislation has increased the maximum size of Pell grants, federal payments toward education based on family need. However, application for these grants and other student aid requires the FAFSA, a complicated financial form. . A recent study offered randomly selected families help completing the form, and students in these families were more likely to enroll in college and received larger financial aid packages. This suggests that simplification of, and assistance with this process could benefit families for whom finances are a major obstacle for secondary education.
Other programs have looked into how to keep students in school and improve their performance while there. Scientifically rigorous trials at a community college in Louisiana and a four-year public university in Canada showed significant improvements in grades and persistence when students were offered financial benefits conditional on maintaining reasonably high grades. These suggest a reward system could keep students on the path toward certificate or diploma completion.

Many more students are enrolling in higher education programs, particular community colleges, than have in the past. The skills taught and certificates and degrees obtained can increase their earnings and employability, particularly if they stay in school longer. New evaluations continue to provide insight into how to further these goals, but we can start by offering more support services and simplifying the financial aid process.

New Census Measure Provides More Detailed View of Poverty

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The U.S. Census Bureau recently announced plans to publish a new poverty measure in conjunction with the traditional measure, a move that can shed additional light on vulnerable populations and how current policies are serving them. While the new measure will not replace the current one in policies and determining program eligibility and funding, it will reveal a more nuanced view of the experience of lower-income Americans.
The standard measure, first published in 1964 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, calculates a federal poverty threshold based on food expenditures as determined by the “thrifty food plan” developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The measure is quite simple; it presumes that food expenditures should make up a third a household’s budget, so it simply multiplies the amount allowed under the thrifty food plan by three. Families are considered poor if their household income falls below this level. While the threshold has been continually adjusted to account for inflation, it does not account for regional differences. Even more problematic is that over the past half-century food prices have dropped relative to expenses such as housing; given that housing costs have soared since the 1960’s, the current measure does not accurately capture the financial strain of some families.
The new measure is based on different calculations of necessary spending and family resources. Household spending includes the costs of food, housing, utilities, and clothing, as well as a little bit extra. Family resources include not only income, but also in-kind benefits such as food stamps. The resource measure also subtracts taxes and tax credits, work expenses such as commuting costs and childcare, and out-of-pocket medical expenses to represent the family’s actual ability to cover the expenses listed above. This more accurate and thorough measure acknowledges the complexity of resources and spending, and it allows for geographic adjustment such as greater costs in places with more expensive housing.
Scheduled to be released annually starting in fall 2011, this new measure will help policy evaluation in three major ways. First, it will help determine if all vulnerable populations are being reached. Second, by including additional measures of needs and resources, researchers and policy makers can better analyze whether assistance programs are mitigating families’ experiences of poverty, such as the difference food stamps make to a family. Third, the measure will show how much necessary expenses add to a family’s burden. By extending beyond food costs to include housing, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and utilities, policy makers can identify areas where the poor need the most help to fulfill their families’ needs.
As explored in an issue of The Future of Children that focuses on antipoverty policies, these types of governmental assistance for child care, health care, and education are critical for needy families. The Census’s new poverty measure allows a new insight into these issues and interventions and can provide a powerful new tool for analysis in the coming years.

For more details, see the federal government’s working group report from March 2010: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/povmeas/SPM_TWGObservations.pdf

Accountability from Teachers Union Can Spark Reform

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A recent Op-Ed in the New York Times and a Boston news radio program covered Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and her proposal for how the union can evaluate teachers more thoroughly. She addressed topics sensitive among many teachers – the use of student performance as a factor in evaluations and the procedures to remove teachers who are ineffective or guilty of misconduct. Breaking with precedent, Weingarten favors using student test scores to assess teachers and agrees that steps to remove ineffective teachers should be eased.

The AFT’s support for these reforms is a positive step in a complicated process. An article in The Future of Children volume Excellence in the Classroom focuses on the role of teachers, and it argues that unions, school administrators, and policymakers should work together to reform school systems. “Reform bargaining” has gained traction in recent years, with the support of both AFT and another major union, the National Education Association (NEA).

“Reform bargaining” was illustrated by the Toledo, Ohio, school district in the early 1980s, when the union and policy makers designed a program to improve teachers’ effectiveness. Under that plan, the first year of teaching was treated as a “trial year.” More experienced but ineffective teachers were required to enter an intervention program, after which even tenured faculty members were let go if they did not show sufficient improvement. The union evaluated the teachers, investing itself fully in the program and helping it succeed. The national ventures promoted by AFT president Weingarten closely reflect this initiative.

Although holding teachers more accountable is a good start, policies linking teachers to student performance must be carefully constructed. Schools may have vastly different student populations, resources, and administrative situations, all of which can create barriers to student achievement, so teacher performance must be viewed in context. Second, educators are concerned that faculty will teach to standardized tests, narrowing content covered in class and giving more superficial treatment to topics, resulting in students being less able to apply and connect material more broadly. These factors make it important to use caution in rating teachers by student achievement, including making it only one component of a broader evaluation.

Research from the FOC volume supports the type of reform recently embraced by AFT, but these measures are only the start of true education reform. Policy makers must work with teachers to clearly articulate goals for teacher quality and to devote resources toward achieving them. Flexibility, peer review, and attention to student needs are key components in this process. The AFT’s movement toward greater accountability must now be met with further commitments by both teachers’ unions and administrators.

Community environments protect against child maltreatment

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On November 19, an international coalition of NGOs used World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse to host events about and bring attention to a threat faced by children all over the world. While most child abuse and neglect prevention strategies focus on parents – by educating them on parenting methods or treating underlying risk factors such as alcohol abuse – this coalition instead addresses the wider culture. This strategy holds that a supportive community can lead parents to make better parenting choices and can help them overcome challenges, whereas negative societal influence can overwhelm even well-intentioned parents.
In the latest The Future of Children volume, Preventing Child Maltreatment, one article looked at the community’s role in preventing child abuse from taking place. The authors found that social environment affects norms about appropriate child-raising behaviors and the acceptability of parents seeking external support when encountering challenges. In addition, positive interactions between neighbors increase the likelihood that parents will feel responsible for and act to protect all children in the neighborhood, whereas isolating and unfriendly neighborhoods may increase parental stress and their tendencies to neglect or mistreat their children. Formal community services can improve parents’ mental health and parenting capabilities and provide temporary relief from parental responsibilities.
The article highlights some innovative community programs that are designed to change a community’s atmosphere and norms to reduce child maltreatment. For instance, Triple-P in South Carolina has offered community-level information campaigns and parenting advice sessions through existing institutions such as child care centers and preschools. The Durham Family Initiative in North Carolina expands the availability of community services and uses outreach workers to build relationships in at-risk communities, address neighborhood needs, and build human capital through leadership and mentoring programs. Both these and other programs have shown promising results in reducing child abuse and neglect cases — suggesting that well-informed, well-equipped, and socially cohesive neighborhoods aid child wellbeing.
These programs face major challenges, however; costs can be significant, and changing behavior and investing in social networks can be difficult. In addition, more work needs to focus on which communities are most in need of such programs and most likely to benefit from them. Of course, individual factors play a major role in child maltreatment cases, so a community approach alone cannot solve problems of child abuse and neglect. Still, building up a supportive community is an important step toward protecting children.

New California Law Undermines Critical Employment Supports

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In the thirteen years since welfare reform was enacted, many people have moved off welfare and into jobs. Some have exited poverty altogether. Many remain on welfare, however, or have used up their time on welfare but continue to face significant challenges to steady employment. This population is disproportionally made up of single mothers, often dealing with obstacles to work such as low levels of education, substance abuse, mental illness, and poor health. States offer, to varying degrees, supports such as child care, transportation, and job training — assistance that is critical to these women’s employment prospects.
The current recession has forced states to reduce expenditures, so work support programs are vulnerable to being cut. For example, cash-strapped California has offered women on welfare with young children the option of foregoing work requirements in return for giving up child care and other work supports. Interestingly, few women have accepted this offer thus far, so California may even require some mothers to take the welfare check without work requirements or supplemental programs. While economically beneficial for California in the short term, this policy could counteract anti-poverty measures in the long run. California’s action also could influence other states, furthering a policy that works against providing single mothers critical support as they make their way off cash assistance and into work.
As an article in The Future of Children’s Anti-Poverty issue explains, child care assistance helps families stay in jobs and have more disposable income. Although low-income families purchase less expensive care than higher-income families, child care comprises a larger portion of their expenditures. Since child care is necessary for working parents, so also are the subsidies to low-income working mothers, who would otherwise not be able to afford to have someone watch their children. In addition, employment assistance is necessary for mothers facing barriers to work such as mental and physical health problems or substance abuse.
One benefit of welfare-to-work programs has been an increase in mothers’ take-home earnings, which can improve family circumstances in many ways. Work coupled with child care subsidies, transportation assistance, Medicaid, and other such programs offers low-income mothers an opportunity to meet their families’ basic needs.

For mothers encountering multiple barriers to work, leaving them able to work only in a limited capacity if at all, cash assistance and work supports are critical. Unfortunately, California’s short term need to cut support programs could hurt vulnerable women just starting to make their way into some level of self-sufficiency.

Limiting Competitive Foods in Schools is Key to Combating Obesity

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Snap peas and lettuce are flourishing in the new White House garden, a project Michelle Obama hopes will call attention to American eating habits. The first family often leads both political and social trends, and child nutrition experts hope Michelle Obama’s influence translates into higher quality school food that helps prevent obesity. Upcoming legislation addresses a growing problem schools are facing: unhealthy foods and drinks impede student health, but they often contribute to school coffers.

School lunches heavily influence nutrition among children and youth. For this reason, The Future of Children addressed school meal programs in the Childhood Obesity issue. The National School Lunch program served 30.5 million school children a day in 2008. In schools participating in the program, sixty percent of children eat school lunches. The federal government heavily subsidizes these lunches and sets minimum nutrition standards that guarantee an adequate provision of protein, Vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron. Still, in many districts these lunches supply too many calories from fat and too few fresh fruits and vegetables. Even more problematic, some districts contract with private companies to sell competitive foods such as fast food in cafeterias and snack vending machines. “Pouring rights” – contracts with companies to sell soda in schools – are also popular. As a result, kids consume a huge amount of unhealthy food and drink items during the school day, and schools have no incentive to change because they benefit financially from the competitive food contracts.
Three significant challenges loom for nutrition advocates. First, school lunches should provide higher-quality food, including fresher produce. Second, the influence of competitive foods must be decreased. Finally, schools need money to afford more expensive food items and supplant income lost from the sale of competitive foods.
One way to bring more healthful food options into cafeterias is to raise standards on school lunches. The federal government’s proposal of one billion more dollars for the National School Lunch Program can reimburse schools for the costs of this improvement. Such national actions would ensure that all children can eat well at school, not just children in more health-conscious or wealthy districts that have already improved their lunch quality.
Moreover, schools should decrease their reliance on competitive foods contracts. The Child Nutrition Act, soon to be revised and reauthorized (House and Senate bills are currently in committee), can impose regulations that limit what outside foods or vending machines may be on school grounds. Ninety-eight percent of high schools have vending machines and such rules could decrease their ubiquity. On their own, schools can look to models in Maine, California, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania that replaced soft drinks with more healthful options, without losing revenue.
U.S. schoolchildren eat nineteen to fifty percent of their daily food while at school, and current regulations allow too much of this food to be unhealthy and fattening. Through increased standards and fewer competitive food contracts, we can make nutritious school lunches a reality for our children.

Partnering with Community Mental Health Services Aids Juvenile Justice System

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A youth diagnosed with bipolar disorder and accused of breaking and entering approaches the court. The judge faces a choice: place him in underfunded mental health care in the community, where he may not receive the treatment he needs, or put him in the juvenile justice system, where he may be adversely affected by the criminality surrounding him. The New York Times recently profiled one such youth, Daniel, who has been in juvenile detention for two years because authorities felt he would receive better treatment there than in his home in Ohio. The Future of Children examined this topic in a recent volume on Juvenile Justice. The volume’s article on mental health found that youth would benefit from better evaluation of mental disorders and from more cooperation between mental health and correctional agencies.
Currently, many systems operate independently to help at-risk youth. Juvenile justice, mental health, education, and child protection institutions all treat youth separately, despite these issues’ interconnectedness. For instance, half to two-thirds of children in juvenile justice custody meet criteria for mental disorders – two-thirds of these for at least two disorders. Both institutional limitations and a lack of standards prevent court authorities from determining which youth would benefit most from community-based treatment, which might be harmed from exposure to prisons, and which pose safety risks to society that necessitate their isolation. This leaves the juvenile justice system to handle many youth who might respond better to mental health treatment outside of detention.
Mitigation of these issues begins with evaluating and sorting criminally detained youth using evidence-based methods that have recently become available. Those deemed not to be dangerous but who have long-term mental health needs, particularly those charged with lesser crimes, should be directed to proven community-based treatment programs. Not only have some of these programs been shown to help improve mental health, but they also reduce recidivism and anti-social behaviors. Youth with mental health disorders that are sentenced to detention should also receive better mental health treatment. Detention centers can partner with community groups to bring professionals into detention centers and offer specialized services to youth with severe difficulties.
Everyone benefits from collaboration between juvenile justice facilities and community mental health programs: courts can direct youth to appropriate services, the community is safer as recidivism declines, and troubled youth receive the treatment they need in order to adjust to a healthful lifestyle.

Should Teachers Pursue Master’s Degrees?

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In an increasingly competitive global economy, high-quality education for American students has become critical for the nation’s future. Most agree that a key to achieving this aim is recruiting and retaining effective teachers, as detailed in an FOC policy brief on the quality of teaching. How to define capable teachers remains controversial. Some have proposed mandating master’s degrees; in contrast, others suggest completely eliminating incentives for continued graduate work. From the New York Times blog Room for Debate to The Future of Children’s Excellence in the Classroom issue, many question the value of teacher education in its current form and seek alternatives.
Education course work has long been part of initial teacher certification and ongoing professional development as a way to increase a teacher’s capacity and value. Although only 16 percent of teachers in their third year of teaching hold master’s degrees, 62 percent of teachers with over 20 years of experience have earned them. Schools encourage this process by providing higher pay incentives and allowing substitution of these courses for recertification requirements.
Lately, however, degree programs have been subject to scrutiny. In theory they ensure that teachers have sufficient subject area knowledge, experience with teaching, and abilities to promote learning through effective and innovations means. Often, however, these programs have been criticized for teaching irrelevant and non-transferable skills, lacking intellectual rigor, or failing to build new knowledge or abilities.
A recent The Future of Children volume examined whether these programs are valuable and have positive effects on student achievement. Research on master’s degrees and teacher quality has generally been inconclusive, according to The Future of Children article “The Effect of Certification and Preparation on Teacher Quality.” This ambiguity reflects the difficulty in 1) establishing whether programs cause improvement in teaching, 2) taking into account the inequity of teacher distribution (with better teachers migrating by choice to higher quality schools), and 3) isolating the effects of graduate degrees on students of different grade levels. As Heather Hill documents in her article “Learning in the Teacher Workforce,” however, some improvement in math scores has been shown for teachers with graduate degrees in math. So far this finding has not been replicated in other subject areas, but it offers potential for more research.
While graduate work has the potential to prepare teachers and increase their students’ performance, recent analysis suggests that it is not currently meeting these goals. Although more research is needed, studies so far suggest that schools should seek teachers with and encourage the pursuit of graduate degrees in the teacher’s primary area of instruction. Programs such as the master’s in education should submit themselves to more rigorous testing to find what skills and knowledge can help teachers positively influence their students’ learning. Higher quality graduate programs and a more thorough understanding of their effects on student learning will lead to better education for our children.

Social Marketing to Teens Thrives Through Web 2.0 Technology

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YouTube videos for a new public health campaign are going viral: the Boston Public Health Commission hopes its messages on sexual safety, disseminated through new internet media, will spread as markedly among city youth as sexually transmitted diseases have. As highlighted in the Boston Globe, this campaign understands that adolescents today are deeply entrenched in media sources that constantly bombard them with messages about how to live; rather than fighting against media exposure, Boston is responding with a positive message sent through the same channels.
The media is a ubiquitous presence in our lives, from radio to TV to the internet. American teens are particularly influenced by their access to the web, which offers chances both to absorb information from outside sources (“Web 1.0”) and to actively contribute to the internet’s offerings through social networking sites, videos, blogs, or message boards and forums (“Web 2.0”). By capitalizing on these many options that play such a large role in adolescent life, social campaigns such as the STI Prevention Drive in Boston can connect with teens on their own terms.
This concept has been explored in an article in Children and Electronic Media, “Social Marketing Campaigns and Children’s Media Use,” and the companion policy brief “Using the Media to Promote Adolescent Well-Being.” Both of these recognize the positive ways that online media can be used to promote healthy behaviors, and they detail successful Web 2.0 campaigns.
With internet available in schools, homes, and even on cell phones, preventing teens from viewing objectionable content is virtually impossible. Some have worried that teens’ web use will lead to more dangerous sexual behavior, including becoming sexually active at a younger age and being less cautious about disease and pregnancy prevention – issues that are explored in another FOC article, “Media and Risky Behaviors.” While such concerns are not unfounded, the designers of Web 2.0 media campaigns recognize that rather than prohibiting internet access, it is far more successful to fight fire with fire – using the same media that promote unhealthy behaviors to promote healthy ones.
While parental guidance and school programs can play a role in discouraging unhealthy behaviors, Web 2.0 media campaigns acknowledge the reality that adolescents are heavily influenced by their peers. The new Boston campaign uses YouTube videos generated by and starring teens, and it also recruits teens to spread the message through other forums, such as street theater and visual advertisements. By having the teens design the content, the messages are more accessible than if they were created and imposed on teens by adults.

Web 2.0 campaigns also offer social organizations increased potential for spreading their messages. For example, the Boston Public Health Commission will field anonymous Facebook questions to experts, allowing teens to ask and get information without embarrassment or social stigma. The internet allows for viral messaging as well – videos can be passed around through blogs, Twitter, emails, or even news coverage, greatly increasing their reach. Marketers know that casual but frequent exposure to a message makes consumers more likely to buy their products; Web 2.0 campaigns use the same methods to promote healthy lifestyle choices among teens.