Discussions about interracial families usually end with the question, "but what about the children?" This paper examines the prerequisites of parenting biracial children, whether in foster, adoptive, one-, or two-parent families and provides suggestions to help parents of biracial children in their child rearing. The paper identifies…

Part-time workers are those working fewer than 35 hours per week. Of the 113 million wage and salary workers in the labor force, only 17 percent are classified as part time. Four of five part-time workers choose to work part-time rather than full-time. The 3.8 million involuntary part-time workers constitute only 3.4 percent of the work force.…

A study determined the perceptions of 254 high school principals toward integrating vocational education into the academic curriculum in Mississippi. Responses to the Principal's Perception Survey were received from 147 principals (93% males, 75% white) for a 57.9 percent return rate. The results of the one-way analysis of variance and frequency…

This brief outlines findings from the National Survey of America's Families, a survey of 44,461 households, on 7 indicators of well-being by race and ethnicity: poverty, family structure, child support, food hardship, housing hardship, health status, and health insurance coverage. For the purpose of this brief, all persons of Hispanic origin were…

This paper explores the impact of emerging information technology on employment opportunities for non-college-educated and minority individuals during 1986-99, examining whether shifts in employment toward information technology related to upward shifts in skills that led to reduced entry-level and total employment opportunities for…

This report describes achievement gaps found in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), North Carolina, compares the status of the WCPSS to achievement in the past, and compares WCPSS to other similar school systems and national data when available. On almost all academic measures, white females were the most successful students in the…

This paper reviews the policy context of school retention and shows that age-grade retardation has been common and growing in American schools from the 1970s-90s. The paper focuses on the period from 1972-98 and on grade retardation at ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 17 years. By age 9 years, the odds of grade-retardation among African American and…

This study examined the progress toward school completion of students who entered ninth grade in fall 1998 and were scheduled to graduate on time in spring 2002 after 4 years of high school, offering outcomes for the class as a whole and for specific groups of students categorized by gender, native language, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status.…

This report examines patterns of poverty using seven different measures: average monthly poverty, episodic poverty, chronic poverty, annual poverty, poverty spells, poverty entry rates, and poverty exit rates. Data come from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and reflect the dynamics of poverty from 1996-1999.…

This report is the second in a series of periodic updates on the achievement gap among various demographic groups in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS). For this report, students academic success in WCPSS was studied, based on outcomes such as achievement test scores, dropout rates, and course enrollment. In some areas, the gaps in…

Differences in help-seeking attitudes and coping strategies among White, African American, and Asian American college students, as well as within Asian Americans (Asian Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans) were examined in the study. A sample of 2,661 students from a large Eastern university participated. Significant…

Between 1990-2000, there was a decrease in the number of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods, but the picture provided by the decrease in poverty levels alone is incomplete and potentially misleading. Using a more comprehensive measure of neighborhood quality, researchers found that the number of children living in severely distressed…

This is the second annual report of a study examining the operation and impact of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP). The longitudinal project is investigating a wide range of issues associated with the operation and impact of the publicly funded voucher program. For the current project year, the evaluation focused on the…

The School Health Initiative: Environment, Learning, and Disease (SHIELD) study examined children's exposure to complex mixtures of environmental agents (i.e., volatile organic chemicals, environmental tobacco smoke, allergens, bioaerosols, metals, and pesticides). Environmental, personal, and biological data were collected on ethnically and…

This report compares the status of women and men on such measures as age, marital status, educational attainment, occupation, income, and poverty status. Findings are based on data collected by the Census Bureau in the Annual Demographic Supplement to the March 2002 Current Population Survey. Overall, women slightly outnumber men in the total…