Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the…

Despite steadily increasing urgency about the nation's lowest-performing schools--those in the bottom five percent--efforts to turn these schools around have largely failed. Marginal change has led to marginal (or no) improvement. These schools, the systems supporting them, and the management of the change process require fundamental rethinking,…

Purpose: We compare the economic consequences of widowhood for preretirement age and early-retirement age Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White women. Methods: We use the 1992 and 2000 waves of the Health and Retirement Study to assess the effects of widowhood on the household incomes and assets of non-Hispanic White, Black, and Hispanic women…

Current trade rules concerning cotton subsidies are intricately linked with poverty and hunger in Mali. Over half of Mali's economy and over 30 million people depend directly on cotton. It is the main cash crop and the most important source of export revenue. Cotton also plays a key role in development policies and in the fight against poverty by…

Greg Duncan, Jens Ludwig, and Katherine Magnuson explain how providing high-quality care to disadvantaged preschool children can help reduce poverty. In early childhood, they note, children's cognitive and socioemotional skills develop rapidly and are sensitive to "inputs" from parents, home learning environments, child care settings, and the…

Achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs) forms the central focus of many donor agencies' policies, resulting in a renewed focus on basic education. This paper explores the different perspectives of donors and the Government of Rwanda (GoR) with regard to education and training. GoR discourse mirrors the international poverty reduction…

International adoption is on the rise in the United States and is not without controversy. Reasons for the increase include higher rates of infertility in couples who have delayed parenthood; increased numbers of children who are relinquished, abandoned, or orphaned around the world; and the influence of third party agencies. Internationally…

Poor people make use of a variety of contextually relevant resources to pursue their livelihood strategies, and there is wide empirical evidence that opportunities and constraints for accessing these may vary considerably for women and men, particularly in the rural areas of developing countries. In this article, micro-evidence from a case study…

According to a new report, the South region in the U.S. now has a "new majority" in its public schools: students from low-income families. Poor children, for the first time in at least 40 years, now constitute 54 percent of students in public schools across that part of the country. While that makes the South the nation's first…

Household consumption expenditure data is crucial for calculating important welfare measures such as poverty headcount rate. However, collecting such data is difficult and cumbersome. As an alternative, we experiment with three methods--consumption correlates model, poverty probability model, and wealth index principal components analysis…

This article, drawing on a set of studies conducted in the framework of the Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA) research project, shows how well African students express themselves if they are allowed to use a familiar African language, and conversely the difficulties they have when forced to use a foreign language, a…

This research reports the initial findings of a statewide study that looks at health, insurance, and access to health care among families leaving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) for work. Most national and state-level evaluation projects focus primarily on the employment characteristics of TANF leavers and pay little or no attention…

Interviews were carried out with 16 South African Zulu widows. Much of what the widows had to say seemed like what one might hear from widows in economically developed countries, but there were also striking differences. All the widows lived in poverty, and for some their grief seemed much more about the poverty than about the husband's death.…

To help inform policymakers and the public about the progress of education in the United States, Congress has mandated that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) produce an annual report, "The Condition of Education." This year's report presents 42 indicators of important developments and trends in U.S. education. These…

For many single mothers and displaced homemakers (homemakers who must suddenly enter the workforce), jobs often do not signify escape from poverty. 1990 U.S. Census data indicate that the number of single mothers and displaced homemakers rose dramatically during the 1980s. Workforce participation for this group also rose during that decade, but…