SUNY series, Youth Social Services, Schooling, and Public Policy – serie

This collection of essays addresses twentieth-century historical and contemporary issues regarding children who are considered to be at risk. The essays explore the language of risk as it is used by the courts, the schools, governmental agencies, and child advocates, those who discover risks and create correctives for children who both need protection and threaten to disturb the social order. The tasks require an exploration of differing, often contradictory, concepts of the child and society that are embedded in public policy debates. Deepening the complexity of the problems, institutions to which we look for solutions are too often faced with conflicts that arise when the needs of the child are at variance with the needs of the institutions themselves. These dilemmas are central to understanding our failure to achieve adequate public policy solutions for children at risk.

This book explores the circumstances of at-risk students and argues that well-intentioned policymakers and educators run the risk of making matters worse rather than better for these students, even if their actions are based on the best social science evidence available. The book demonstrates the diverse, idiosyncratic nature of these students, argues that traditional social science methods cannot capture this idiosyncrasy and diversity, and presents research methods, policies, and programs that can accommodate student diversity.

This book examines the joint effort of twentieth-century public school administrators and private philanthropy to initiate reforms to provide for children with learning difficulties. The author explores the development of these reforms from the establishment of special classes for backward children at the beginning of the century to the creation of programs for learning disabled children. He considers what this history tells us about current efforts to provide for at-risk students. He looks at both the way school administrators conceptualized childhood learning difficulties and the institutional arrangements which they introduced to accommodate these students, and pays particular attention to the preference of school administrators throughout this century for accommodating low achieving children in segregated classes and programs.

Examines ways in which school structures can change to increase parental involvement.This book offers a response to the policy failures associated with parent involvement in schools by arguing against traditional, piecemeal approaches to enhancing parent involvement in schools, and amplifying the importance of parents' social networks in the discussion of family-school partnerships. The interaction between social structure and school organization provides compelling indications of the need to recast the concept of parent involvement to one of community building.

Examines ways in which school structures can change to increase parental involvement.This book offers a response to the policy failures associated with parent involvement in schools by arguing against traditional, piecemeal approaches to enhancing parent involvement in schools, and amplifying the importance of parents' social networks in the discussion of family-school partnerships. The interaction between social structure and school organization provides compelling indications of the need to recast the concept of parent involvement to one of community building.

Establishes the power of early care and education to change children's lives, particularly children in poverty.Barnett and Boocock present a multi-disciplinary assessment of the long-term outcomes of early care and education in the United States and abroad. Innovative new research, together with up-to-date, comprehensive reviews, provide lessons for the design of early childhood programs, policies, and research. Contributors from the fields of education, psychology, sociology, and economics address questions about the causal relationships through which early childhood programs produce their long-term effects, the characteristics of effective early childhood programs, how nations respond to the global social and economic trends that are changing the lives of children and their families everywhere, child care's effects on maternal labor force participation, the potential and perils of welfare reform, and the implications of national economic and political structures for early care and education policies.A unique feature of the book is its attention to the practical problems of conducting research to support public policy development, translating research results into public policy, and improving communication between researchers and policy makers. The research presented in this important volume clearly establishes that early care and education can permanently improve the lives of children in poverty, provides research-based recommendations for achieving that goal through public policy, and sets an agenda for future research on early care and education's long-term outcomes.

Provides a variety of instructional approaches that recognize the cultural and linguistic diversity found in students classified as learning disabled.This book addresses issues in teacher preparation and parental roles in the education of children with learning disabilities. It provides a variety of instructional approaches that recognize the cultural and linguistic diversity found in students classified as learning disabled. There is a critical need to incorporate a sensitivity to issues of diversity into educational assessment, curriculum planning, teacher training, and interactions with parents, especially in large urban areas which are characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity. Significant changes in traditional special education assessment and instruction are needed to effectively deal with the overrepresentation of minority students classified as learning disabled, and resolve the inherent problems with the definition and diagnosis of learning disabilities.