This study examines whether children born outside of marriage and currently living in single-mother families are more likely to be poor than children in single-mother families who were born to married parents. Using the 1997 National Survey of America's Families, the study finds that among children living with single mothers, those born outside of…

This paper examines whether children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a "poverty trap," with the extra income from child labor coming at the expense of the children's longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education. The poverty trap argument depends on children's work being substitutable for schooling. Casual…

It is generally recognized that the home background of students is important for their achievement and progress through school, but obtaining accurate information is becoming increasingly difficult. School-level indicators of socioeconomic status, although coarse, may consist of more than the sum of family backgrounds of students attending the…

This book examines the experiences of 32 men participating in Parents' Fair Share (PFS), which was designed to help them get better jobs, pay child support, and become more involved with their children. All participants were low-income, noncustodial fathers who were not paying court mandated child support. Most were African American or Latino and…

Although the progress toward poverty reduction remains sluggish, other dimensions of social welfare in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region show signs of improvement. Adult literacy and school enrollment rates, life expectancy at birth, access to safe water, and nutrition indicators are improving. However, other factors demonstrate that…

This report presents data on Hispanic Americans, one of the nation's largest racial minorities. Hispanics have had much lower high school completion rates and higher dropout rates than blacks and whites since the 1970s. Hispanic high school students are more likely to carry weapons and more likely to become pregnant than black and white students.…

In recent years, the belief that marriage bestows large economic gains has generated enthusiasm for policy proposals that encourage the formation and continuation of two-parent families. This study examined the effects of family structure on economic resources, controlling for unobservable family background characteristics. Data were drawn from…

Since his inauguration in July 2001, Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo has proposed to take actions in the areas of macroeconomic stabilization; reopening of country's access to international financial markets; budget modernization and state decentralization; social policy; revamping of the armed forces, police, and internal security services;…

Discriminant validity of a measure of children's readiness for school was assessed by testing whether it distinguished between groups of children hypothesized to differ, on the basis of demographic characteristics, in their school readiness. The volunteer sample consisted of 3,370 kindergartners in Vermont public schools. Previous group care…

This brief discusses how living arrangements in general, and cohabitation in particular, affect children's material wellbeing and socioeconomic outcomes, documenting how poverty rates and food insecurity differ across living arrangements using data from the 1999 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF). It examines how other measures of child…

Using data from the 2003 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, this study found that real median household money income declined by 1.1 percent between 2001-2002 to $42,409. Real median household income was unchanged between 2001-2002 for three of four alternative income definitions. The fourth, real median household…

This study examined overall poverty concentration in the 1990s, also investigating how the composition of concentrated poverty shifted between different types of locations and by race and ethnicity, and how the changes took place. Data came from the Neighborhood Change Database and the 2000 Census. While things got better in high poverty…

This brief provides a snapshot of the types and scale of expansions that states have adopted in the early implementation phase of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a program to expand health coverage for low-income children up to age 19. In addition, the brief examines how coverage expansions vary in relation to state…

This paper reports results of the first systematic analysis of the progress of standards-based reform in U.S. school districts. Using data from a recent national survey of school districts (n=2,700) and a companion national survey of schools (n=1,177), it is found that not only do districts appear to play an important role, bigger districts appear…

This report represents one component of a project to examine how recently or whether enacted federal education reforms, put into place through the reauthorization of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Improving America's Schools Act of 1994), are being implemented in high poverty schools. The first part of the report…