children

Photo by Rebecca Krebs via Flickr
Photo by Rebecca Krebs via Flickr

The share of births to unmarried women in the United States has almost doubled over the last 25 years, going from 22% of births in 1985 to 41% in 2010. These are not just teenagers or older women having babies on their own. Parents who are living together but not married account for much of the overall increase in births to unmarried women, especially in the last decade.  

For babies and children growing up, living with two cohabiting parents in many ways resembles living with two married parents. There are two potential earners contributing to the economics of the household and two potential care-givers. But we cannot just assume that cohabitation and marriage are the same, because couples who have a child while living together are more likely to separate at a later point than married couples who have a child. Furthermore, researchers have found that children’s wellbeing can be undermined when the living arrangements of their parents change.

To draw meaningful conclusions about the impact of rising childbearing among cohabiting couples, we need to learn more about whether cohabiting families are becoming more or less stable over time. Our research focuses specifically on couples who have had a child together. These couples express high hopes that their relationships will last, but what actually happens and with what consequences for their children? We used nationally representative survey data from the 1990s and 2000s to examine changes in the stability of married families, cohabiting families where marriages do not happen, and cohabiting families where parents marry around the time a child arrives. more...

Few cities have adopted charter schools more rapidly than New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Although the Orleans Parish School Board still operates a few traditional public schools as well as its own charter schools, the Recovery School District run by the state has just become the first district in the country to have only charter schools. Many scholars regard New Orleans as an important site for studying many kinds of educational reforms, and we have done our own study of two community-oriented charter schools that opened in 2010 and 2013.

Although many existing New Orleans charter schools have been run by local or national non-profit organizations that emphasize the delivery of college preparatory instruction to mostly poor, non-white students, the two schools we studied were founded by parents and community members who are intensely engaged and have strong visions about the role of their schools in the community. These parents and community members have endeavored to build schools that foster cross-group friendships, serve as hubs for the surrounding neighborhood, and combine strong academics with a broad curriculum. This approach differs from the usual tendency of urban charter schools to define success narrowly in terms of student achievement on tests. Our study of these two grassroots charter schools offers important lessons for reformers well beyond New Orleans who believe in a more community-based approach to school improvement. more...

In recent years, many large urban districts in the United States have dramatically changed the way they manage the schools they supervise. For decades, most of the public schools in cities were run by central district offices, and every school in the district used many of the same basic materials and ideas to teach their students. Now many central districts are overseeing schools run by others, using what is often called a “portfolio model” or a “portfolio management model.” These terms are meant to indicate that such districts are carefully selecting schools to include or remove from their offerings – so that good schools are kept and weak ones are closed down.

In theory, portfolio management has an appealing logic: If central offices lay out clear expectations and give charter school groups and other organizations that run particular schools a lot of freedom in figuring out how to meet the overall goals, then some especially strong schools can be expected to emerge. The most effective schools can be given the opportunity to expand.

In practice, however, research suggests that portfolio management does not have a clear, predictable influence on school quality. The impact seems to depend on organizational design as well as on the social characteristics and resources of particular communities. more...

The United States is sending more and more people to prison—at an extraordinary rate compared to other western countries and our own past. U.S. incarceration rates have risen dramatically, from the imprisonment of about one hundred of every 100,000 Americans in 1970, to the imprisonment of more than 500 out of every 100,000 people in 2010.

So what? Haven’t most prisoners committed destructive crimes? Many have, of course, yet increases in imprisonment are no longer simply tracking crime rates. During the late 1970s and 1980s, incarceration rates did rise roughly in parallel to increases in crime. But crime rates have declined since 1990, while rates of incarceration have continued their upward march.

When observers express concern about “mass incarceration” or the contemporary U.S. “prison boom,” they are thinking not only of the fast-rising rates of imprisonment disconnected from crime rates. They are also worried about the disproportionate impact on racial minorities and the most economically disadvantaged Americans. Remarkably, for black men with low levels of education, going to prison is a more typical life event than attending college or entering the military. more...