Urban Institute Press,U.S. – förlag

The United States has a long record of ambivalence toward recent immigrants. Nowhere is this love-hate relationship more evident than in the public school systems of high-immigration states like California, where pro- and anti-immigration advocates have waged a long-running battle over “bilingual” education versus “English immersion” programs. Unfortunately, this fierce political debate does not always acknowledge day-to-day reality in the schools, and the policies that result may ultimately hinder the schools and students they intend to help. Beyond Bilingual Education cuts through the politics, offering a statistical portrait of English language learners in five large California school districts and highlighting the results of more than 120 interviews conducted with teachers, school administrators, and community service providers about the challenges facing recent immigrants and the schools that serve them. This combined approach yields essential intelligence for policymakers, advocates, and administrators seeking to escape the trap of immigration politics. It is a vital perspective, because how our schools receive, treat, and educate these future workers will directly affect our country’s economic and social health and progress.

Long before reinventing government came into vogue, the Urban Institute pioneered methods for government and human services agencies to measure the performance of their programs. This comprehensive guidebook synthesizes more than two decades of Harry Hatry's groundbreaking work. It covers every component of the performance measurement process, from identifying the program’s mission, objectives, customers, and trackable outcomes to finding the best indicators for each outcome, the sources of data, and how to collect them. Hatry explains how to select indicator breakouts and benchmarks for comparison to actual values, and describes numerous uses for performance information. Since the publication of the first edition in 1999, the use of performance measurement has exploded at all levels of U.S. government, in nonprofit agencies, and around the world. The new edition has been revised and expanded to address recent developments in the field, including the increased availability of computer technology in collecting and presenting information, the movement to use outcome data to improve services, and the quality control issues that have emerged as data collection has increased. It is an indispensable handbook for newcomers and an important resource for experienced managers looking to improve their use of outcome data.

A new Urban Institute Press book offers a slate of reform opportunities for the ailing subprime mortgage market and provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of this still-evolving segment of the mortgage industry.

The history of America’s tax system can be written largely as a history of America’s wars. During World War II, Americans were urged to ration food, raise money, and accept higher taxes. After September 11, we were given tax cuts and asked to shop. Has the United States broken a noble tradition of fiscal sacrifice with the current, unprecedented wartime tax cuts, or are they the mark of new economic, and social forces at work? War and Taxes weighs the question by considering six conflicts that span the American Revolution to the present war in Iraq.

"The corporate tax could soon be headed in new directions," Dan Shaviro writes in Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax, wherein he assesses the threats to America’s corporate tax code and challenges conventional wisdom on the best avenues for reform. Shaviro dissects the vagaries of the law, lays out the fundamental policy issues, and considers the road ahead. As rising globalization, capital mobility, financial innovation, and political polarization combine to destabilize tax policy and government revenue, Shaviro maps the path to fair, revenue-generating reform.

For the nearly 2 million children in the United States whose parents are in prison, caretaking necessary for optimal development is disrupted. These vulnerable youth—a population that has shot up 80 percent in the last 20 years—are more likely to experience learning difficulties, poor health, and substance abuse, and eventually be incarcerated themselves. Addressing the needs of children with imprisoned parents is urgent from corrections, child welfare, health care, and education perspectives. Children of Incarcerated Parents integrates a diverse literature, pulling together rigorous scholarship from criminology, sociology, law, psychiatry, social work, nursing, psychology, human development, and family studies. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will find in this volume here new directions for research and policies that will improve these children's life chances.

In Beyond Privatopia: Rethinking Residential Private Government, attorney and political science scholar Evan McKenzie explores emerging trends in private governments and competing schools of thought on how to operate them, from state oversight to laissez-faire libertarianism. The most common analyses see CIDs from a neoclassical economic, positive point of view. HoAs, this strain of analysis maintains, are more efficient and frugal than municipalities. And what could be more democratic than government of the neighbors, by the neighbors? But scholars coming from institutional analysis, communitarianism, and critical urban theory frameworks see possible repercussions. These include a development’s failure leaving residents on the hook for crippling sums, capture or extension of the local state, and convergence of public and private local governments

Imprisonment casts a long shadow in the United States. Currently, 1.4 million individuals are behind bars in America's state and federal prisons. For every person who goes to prison, there is a family and community left behind. Despite the huge number of affected families and children, there is little research on the impact of incarceration on American family life. In Prisoners Once Removed, the authors explore this important issue-from the psychological impact of imprisonment on prisoners and the difficulty of reentering free society to the challenges faced by communities who must integrate the prisoners once they return. They look at family functioning during a period of imprisonment, and how families are affected by the return of an incarcerated parent. Finally, they evaluate the current system and suggest ways to improve interaction between the corrections and health and human services to better serve the growing population of children, families, and communities. This book is vital reading for anyone who is concerned about foster care, child development, strengthening families, and post-prison adjustment.

The past several decades have seen unprecedented growth in the scope and complexity of relationships between government and nonprofit organizations. These relationships have been more fruitful than many critics had feared and more problematic than many advocates had hoped. Nonprofits and Government is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary exploration of nonprofit–government relations. The second edition of this important book is fully updated and includes two new chapters. The authors address a host of important issues, including nonprofit advocacy, direct regulatory and tax policy, the conversion of nonprofits to for-profits, clashes in government interaction with religion and the arts, and international nonprofit–government relationships. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers alike will benefit from the authors’ wide-ranging discussion.