This article begins by examining current crises facing historically marginalized youth, which necessitate more critical approaches to youth development and empirical investigations into the challenges that young people face. This requires not only listening to their voices, but actively engaging them in investigations of and interventions into…

Little attention has been paid to the role of band music in the lives of young people in the first half of the twentieth century. For those in institutional care, musical education represented a rare opportunity to prepare for a specialist career in the armed forces. For the care institutions, the boys' band provided many benefits as it presented…

Positive peer reporting (PPR) is a peer-mediated intervention that involves teaching and rewarding peers for providing descriptive praise during structured daily sessions. PPR has been used in residential facilities to improve social acceptance, increase prosocial behaviors, and decrease negative interactions of youth identified as peer rejected.…

Social-emotional competence is an important determinant of school readiness. School readiness, in turn, sets the stage for school success. There is clear longitudinal evidence that school success, attachment and bonding to the schooling process, and full engagement of schooling can, in combination, operate as a protective factor against a host of…

This article describes the language and early literacy program, including the use of extra instructional support, provided to low-income children in one Early Reading First (ERF) project. The article (a) describes the specific strategies used within a tutoring program to provide assistance beyond the classroom intervention program to children…

This article discusses the use of data-based feedback and support to teachers in Head Start classrooms to facilitate increased use of effective instructional and managerial practices. The authors conducted a study to examine the impact of providing Head Start preschool classroom teachers with data regarding their use of established instructional…

Among social justice efforts to make curriculum more engaging and achieving for "less advantaged" learners, the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach, as developed by Moll, Gonzalez and associates (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), offers sound conception and a track-record. The Redesigning…

We examined the psychometric properties of two scales of the parenting stress index-short form (PSI-SF) in a low-income sample of fathers of toddlers. The factor structure, reliability, and validity of the parental distress and parent-child dysfunctional interaction subscales were assessed for 696 fathers in a multi-site study of Early Head Start.…

Teachers were trained to use reinforcement and induction to increase prosocial behavior in a sample of 98 children in Head Start-affiliated preschools, using a peer coaching model. There was one control group and three intervention groups: reinforcement-only, induction-only, and reinforcement-and-induction. Results indicated that the intervention…

This study explores whether two computer-based literacy interventions--a "synthetic phonics" and an "analytic phonics" approach produce qualitatively distinct effects on the early phonological abilities and reading skills of disadvantaged urban Kindergarten (Reception) children. Participants (n=53) were assigned by random allocation to one of the…

This paper challenges the orientations and assumptions underpinning policies for disadvantaged young people (DYP) in Australia. We argue that policy interventions for young people generally exhibit a binary divide, some policies fostering leadership and creative endeavours targeted on "high-functioning" young people, especially within…

Children and youth at risk are a major challenge facing education systems in Europe. Some systems seem to be mastering this challenge better than others. Observations of the educational fate of immigrant minority children can shed light on the efficiency and performance of European education systems with respect to their ability to deal with…

Children living in poverty face considerable developmental risks. This report presents interim results from an evaluation of parental employment and educational services delivered within a two-generational, early childhood program targeting low-income families who are expecting a child or who have a child under age 3. This study is part of the…

This paper explores patterns of growth in participation in six Anglophone and seven Francophone countries in SSA. The countries are Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Senegal. These countries all have large scale Universal Primary Education programmes and all have…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of charter schools designed to improve the educational opportunities available to low-income families. KIPP schools seek to boost their students' academic achievement and, ultimately, prepare them to enroll and succeed in college. This paper provides the most thorough analysis to date of the…