The development and validation of a measure of adolescent future expectations associated with work, education, family, health, and church/community participation is presented. The 25-item measure was administered to a sample of 389 7th- to 12th-grade urban poor and working-class Chilean students. Results of an exploratory principal axis factor…

Homelessness affects people of all backgrounds, races, and religions. Whether the number of homeless people is 300,000 or 3 million, as some estimates claim, there are too many people in America who struggle to find shelter daily, making homelessness one of the most serious problems facing the nation today. This discussion, designed for the…

This report details findings of one year of a seven-year study of the relationship between pre-college enrichment experiences and the development of academic ethos, or scholar identity, in disadvantaged adolescents, both African American and European American. Under the auspices of the University of Tennessee, Project EXCEL examines the…

Catholic schools in the United States are engaged in a struggle to balance mission and market concerns. This paper presents a survey that explores the reasons why predominantly non-Catholic parents chose to send their children to a Catholic elementary school. The paper also examines the Catholic school's responsiveness to market forces as it…

An examination of service delivery in early childhood education in Ireland reveals that the lack of a national policy has led to a great variation in services, little possibility for assessing and regulating quality, and a very limited choice for many children and their families. This article describes Ireland's system for early education…

In 1994, the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) in Washington state subsidized child care for about 35,000 children each month, with financial support provided in part by federal funds. The primary objective of this survey, the fourth in a series, was to set local maximum rates for subsidy programs based on the private-paying child…

An exploration of the economic and historical causes of homelessness is combined with accounts of individuals and families who are on the streets or in shelters and how they came to that point. Following an overview of the problem of homelessness and its causes, nine chapters present stories of homeless individuals, friends, and families. These…

School choice for poor children is likely to be an issue in many state and congressional races. Lawmakers and parents need to pay close attention to the quality of academic evaluations of school choice programs. Evaluations of the program in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) provide a case in point. In 1990, Milwaukee instituted the nation's first publicly…

This book is about teenage pregnancy among Latina teenagers in East Los Angeles (California). It focuses on teenage pregnancy and motherhood among economically disadvantaged Latinas aged 17 and under. The young mothers in this study were participants in a series of intervention efforts to prevent repeat pregnancy at a family planning clinic. This…

In response to a Senate request, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gathered existing data on educational attainment and achievement of residents in public and Indian housing projects. Data sources included the 1989 American Housing Survey, the 1988 Survey of Income and Program Participation, the 1988 National Longitudinal…

Findings of a study that explored ways of designing elementary-level instruction for disadvantaged students are presented in this paper, with a focus on the impact of the educational environment on instructional practices. The study sought to identify the current range of instructional practices and demonstrate their potential applications to…

This project sought to identify and assist third-grade underachieving gifted students in four elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio. The four schools chosen for the project demonstrated a significant discrepancy between ability and achievement test scores among higher ability students within their culturally/economically disadvantaged student…

Poverty among Latino children has soared during the past decade, accounting for half of the total growth in the number of American children who are poor. One in three Latino children was living in poverty as of 1989. Many Latino children are poor despite their parents' best efforts to pull their families out of poverty and despite the fact that…

Indiana 4-H Youth Programs are being used to enhance the quality of life for troubled adolescents in residential group homes and economically disadvantaged urban areas and to provide summer-school programs for children of migrant farm workers. Four basic types of program delivery modes exist in Indiana: clubs, junior leader program activities,…

A premise of this paper is that in his book "The Truly Disadvantaged" (1987), William Julius Wilson fails to recognize the effect of covert racism on the plight of the African American underclass. Wilson asserts that historical racism has contributed to the present predicament of the underclass, who have been abandoned in the ghettos by…