Meant to orient a broad audience to basic issues of child and family policy in the United States today, this book includes an overview of the recent history of child and family policy in the United States, an exploration of several political economic conditions underlying changes in these policies, case studies of selected local, state and federal…

As part of a larger ethnographic study, this book focuses on Mexican American family life, parental attitudes toward school, and efforts to increase student achievement by changing families. Exploration of the daily life of the 10 immigrant families sheds light on what educators have interpreted as the disinterest of newly arrived immigrants in…

During the 1994-95 program year, the staff of Even Start, a family literacy program in Lincoln (Nebraska), and an evaluator collaborated to create a low-stakes, small-scale portfolio assessment to collect information on program impact. The small scale of the evaluation offered opportunities to involve the staff in each step of the portfolio…

Many service systems have fundamentally reoriented services by creating infrastructures that link resources from many parts of the community. This paper reviews 50 comprehensive community-based initiatives and describes their costs, results, and methods of finance. The overview defines comprehensive community-based initiatives and outlines…

The impending devolution of program responsibility from the federal government to states and localities will probably increase their responsibility for designing and funding strategies for services to children and families. This paper presents state-by-state profiles of patterns of spending for education and other key health, welfare, and social…

The five-year Georgia Head Start Quality Initiative was founded in 1994 to provide training and technical assistance (consisting of monthly group training sessions and individual on-site consultation) for Georgia Head Start administrators as they pursue National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accreditation. This document…

The Decker Family Development Center in Barberton (Ohio) is a holistic "one-stop shop" that provides services to families who are at multiple risk. During its 5 years of operation, this center has developed a model that goes beyond cooperation into co-construction to empower stakeholders. This paper describes the center and its successes…

This paper consists of a transcript of the testimony of the Director of Early Childhood Services at the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources on April 21, 1994. The testimony addresses the issue of improving the connections between early childhood programs and public…

This book brings together sources of material on poverty and family health and makes it accessible to health and welfare teams working with families with young children. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and uses both "hard" and "soft" data to provide facts and figures and first-hand accounts of how poverty affects family…

This handbook presents the essential components of a comprehensive family service system for low-income families. It shows, through the documentation and description of two low-income African American communities over 4 years of development work, the types of information that should be collected about community functioning so that informed…

This report outlines the Bridgeport Futures Initiative, a collaborative project undertaken in 1990 by health, education, and social service organizations in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to improve the lives and educational outcomes of children and youth. The report discusses the origins of the initiative, as well as the cross-systems co-location case…

This volume, part five of a six-part report, is a three-part guide that offers practical advice for recruiting, training, and managing staff for a family-support program; it includes discussions about typical problems and the ways practitioners have chosen to resolve them. Part 1 discusses how to determine the type of staff needed and how to hire…

Increasing numbers of children begin formal schooling without the requisite skills or abilities to succeed, most often due to deficiencies in language and emotional maturity. This study sought to identify potential precursors to later kindergarten difficulties that would suggest specific areas needing further study and support. Study participants…

This report presents an approach to welfare reform using the welfare-to-work programs possible under the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) portion of the Family Support Act. The document describes how state and local governments can design and implement two-generation interventions that combine services to help parents achieve…

This study looks at Canadian families' efforts to begin an inclusive life for their children with disabilities--and for society--"right off the bat," in the child care arena. It examines quality child care situations that welcome children with disabilities. It explores needed reform of public policy and programs to build on those…