Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, families are subject to greater work requirements, and the severity of sanction for noncompliance has increased. Using Wisconsin longitudinal administrative data, the authors performed event history analysis to examine the dynamic patterns of sanctioning and the patterns of benefits following a…

Public debate about school choice is often polarized between those who favor and oppose total free markets in education. However, the serious intellectual work on choice focuses on more moderate alternatives that involve a mixture of public and private accountability. A regulated market model of educational accountability would mix government…

Objective: The objective of the present article is to review and discuss Familias Unidas, an empirically supported, family-based, culturally specific drug abuse and HIV prevention intervention for Hispanic immigrant adolescents and their families. Method: The authors focus on engagement and retention as well as on intervention delivery.…

The conceptualization of individual quality of life is reasonably well established, and now family quality of life and intellectual disability is emerging as an important field of study. This article examines comparative family quality of life in three types of families: those with a child who has Down syndrome, those with a child with autism, and…

An earlier article published in this journal sought to recover the views of professionals concerned with the delivery and implementation of a "Third Way" multiagency programme tackling the social exclusion of young children and their families known as Sure Start. The tentative findings suggested a "bottom-up" partnership…

"Success for All" is a comprehensive reform model, which applies cooperative learning, tutoring, family support services, and extensive professional development to help high-poverty schools succeed with their pupils. A review of research on "Success for All" with African American students focuses on evidence that the model reduces the achievement…

The authors examined the effects of antipoverty programs on children's cumulative poverty-related risk and the relationship between cumulative poverty-related risk and child outcomes among low-income families. Samples included 419 children ages 3-10 years in the New Hope program and 759 children ages 2-9 years in the Minnesota Family …

This report provides a detailed examination of the various federal programs for children and families and outlines ways in which the United States Congress and Executive Branch could make these programs work better. Intricate and often overlapping goals and actions are typical of the Congressional committees and Executive Branch departments that…

The prevailing issues in the development of family literacy were reviewed, and assumptions about families, family support, and learning upon which the concept is being developed were examined. A total of 173 studies on the following topics were reviewed: parent-child relationships and reading, parent-child early reading, parent/family beliefs and…

The Ounce of Prevention Fund is a public-private partnership which promotes the well-being of children and adolescents by working with families, communities, and policymakers. Following a letter from the Fund's directors reiterating that prevention programs save scarce resources, this report updates several prevention programs funded by this…

The demand for family foster care services has increased rapidly during the past decade, as has the number of special needs children requiring foster care. This monograph presents information collected over the past 20 years concerning policies and programs which have been used to retain and recruit foster parents. The ever-increasing need for…

Developed to provide assistance in the building of an effective home-based program for Head Start children and their families, this handbook may serve as a blueprint for parent-focused home visits that assist the child and family to meet their special needs. Chapter one focuses on the home visitation model for providing services to families and…

This report outlines the views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' 40-member Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers in regard to the Early Head Start Program. This program, introduced in 1995, is designed to provide services to children from birth to age 3 (and their families) who were not previously…

The model for school-linked services is based on the ideal of providing a coherent and seamless web among school professionals and other service agencies. However, schools are often organized around specialized functions that are not wholly aligned and coordinated in function and purpose. This paper examines the nature of schools as "aggregative"…

Parent involvement programs for rural communities work best when they respond to particular features of the communities they serve. Research provides conflicting findings about whether rural parents are more or less involved in their children's education than are urban or suburban parents. Even if parent involvement is more prevalent in rural…