This collection was gathered from a seminar entitled "Education and Leisure in North European Urban Spaces," which was the result of cooperation between the Sports, Leisure, and Tourism Work Group of the International Union of Architects and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Papers were given…

This paper summarizes a 22-month ethnographic study of rural Shandon (California), a community that demonstrates the social and demographic changes resulting from agricultural intensification in rural California. Changes in the Shandon area's agricultural production have produced a demographic shift from the homogeneous Anglo-American farming and…

This paper presents a site and project description and the conceptual framework of the Curriculum Articulation Project (CAP) and its relation to current math and science education reform initiatives. CAP is based on the notion that the teacher is the best individual to ascertain the learning needs of the urban, and often economically…

This study examines how Latino families in Carpinteria (California) are building a community among themselves and with the school in support of the students. Parents who are knowledgeable about the school's expectations and the way in which the school operates are better advocates for their children than parents who lack such information. Research…

Issues pertinent to the positive and lasting reform of innercity school systems serving disadvantaged minority youth are explored in this paper. Current and past reforms to improve school effectiveness have dealt primarily with instructional deficiencies of the school. However, three clusters of problems must be addressed: institutional…

To identify remedial and preventive interventions that target dysfunctional processes in the family, this study compared the structure and processes of neglectful and non-neglectful families. A sample of 102 neglectful families was identified and recruited from the caseloads of protective service workers in Georgia. A comparison group of 103…

The Youth Employment Program Assistance Project was a New York City initiative to demonstrate how employment training for out-of-school, economically disadvantaged youth can be made educationally vigorous. It involved four training programs with a few hundred students. The project focused on the following principles and goals: all learning…

This paper provides an overview of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, an organization that sponsors studies of the efficacy of intervention in the early years of development, especially with economically disadvantaged children. Using several High/Scope Foundation studies to illustrate its points, the paper examines issues common to…

The pilot Ecumenical Child Health Project tested ways to coordinate local church activities aimed at improving young children's access to health care. Within a year, coordinators at 3 pilot sites had succeeded in initialing or enhancing several activities that linked health care to more than 1000 families and children living in medically…

In order to increase the knowledge base on the public policy issues pertaining to family homelessness, Columbia University and the Institute for Children & Poverty designed and implemented an extensive survey on the demographics of homeless families. Data on more than 140 variables were collected from 743 homeless heads-of-households in the spring…

The majority of parents now living in homeless shelters, typically young single mothers with one or two children under the age of six, have spent their lives spiraling downward through a complex and self-perpetuating cycle of family violence, community violence, and poverty. Sixty-three percent of homeless parents, a survey has found, live with…

Many proposals for welfare reform center on the issue of marriage-based families versus single-parent families and oversimplify the relationship between single-parenting and poverty. Research done in upstate rural New York among low-income families showed that personal and economic characteristics of married and single mothers were similar as to…

Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), states face steadily increasing work participation requirements. The TANF structure presents one new option: the ability to use TANF funds for community service employment in wage-paying, publicly funded jobs designed to provide work for individuals and to address unmet community needs. A…

This research note documents the Hispanization of the poor in Los Angeles (California). The single most dramatic change in income inequality in this city over the last few decades is the ethnic recomposition of the economically disadvantaged. The number of poor Latinos has grown so significantly since the late 1960s that this group now constitutes…

At this hearing, part of a series of hearings on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Secretary of the Department of Education, Lamar Alexander, gave testimony designed to present the Bush administration's recommendations on reauthorization of the Act to the Congress. Before the Secretary's testimony the following…