Lessons learned from the It Takes a Valley program: recruitng and retaining future teachers to serve high-needs schools

“It Takes a Valley” is a teacher preparation program that aims to recruit and retain teachers in schools that serve students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This program provides future teachers with extensive early teaching experience and chances to develop strategies for success in this type of educational context. The theoretical basis for this program\u27s approach is examined, some key aspects of the program are considered, the initial evaluation of the program and the lessons learned to date are explored, the challenges and growing pains encountered by the program are examined, and the implications of the program for teacher education are discussed

Supports for Working Families: Work and Care Policies across Welfare States

Familienpolitik, Sozialpolitik, Sozialstaat, Eltern, Erwerbstätigkeit, Familie, Kinderbetreuung, Vereinigte Staaten, Westeuropa, Family policy, Social policy, Welfare state, Parents, Labour force participation, Family, Child care, United states, Western

Presentation: Gornick & Meyers

Presentation by Janet C. Gornick, City University of New York and Marcia K. Meyers, University of Washington on Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, for the event: The Great American Time Squeeze: The Politics of Work and Family in a 24/7 World on March 3, 2005

Silicon Valley Partnership for Recruiting and Preparing Quality Teachers For Students in High Needs Schools: It Takes A Valley

The old African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child seemed apropos as the team members discussed our shared commitment to recruiting and retaining quality teachers for our children. However, we are not a village, we are the Silicon Valley hence, It takes a valley to raise the teachers, specifically prepared for the children in our valley who are struggling in high need schools

Public Policies and the Employment of Mothers: A Cross-National Study

This paper uses data from fourteen industrialized countries, during the middle to late 1980's, to analyze the effect of national child care and maternity leave policies on employment. The results demonstrate a strong association between policy configurations and the employment patterns of women with children

Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States

Despite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns of mothers\u27 employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers\u27 employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy packages , these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions. The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined. The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women\u27s labor market attachment. Prior findings on women\u27s labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers\u27 employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family policies that specifically help women to combine paid work with parenting

Projections for Austin's COVID-19 Staged Alert System, Incorporating Reported Cases as Additional Indicator

To support public health decision-making in Austin, Texas, we use a data-driven model of COVID-19 transmission in the five-county Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to project hospitalizations under plausible scenarios for future COVID-19 transmission. This model integrates Austin's COVID-19 staged-alert system, which informs the city's adaptive risk-based guidelines. Given the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and the ongoing roll-out of vaccines, the existing threshold for triggering the return from the second lowest alert stage (Stage 2) to the lowest alert stage (Stage 1) may be insufficient to prevent surges, as described in our recent report [1]. To address this concern, we evaluate the addition of new criteria for reducing the alert stage, based on a CDC framework for estimating levels of community transmission. Specifically, we consider tracking the number of new cases reported over the preceding seven days, and requiring that this value: (i) drops below 10 per 100,000 before relaxing from Stage 3 to Stage 2 and (ii) drops below 5 per 100,000 before relaxing to Stage 1. The projections we present consider several scenarios for the future transmission of the Delta variant and the emergence of other variants of concern. We assume that Delta is 1.65 times more transmissible than previous variants, has a higher hospitalization rate among symptomatic individuals, has a shorter incubation period, and leads to longer ICU stays. The hypothesized variants of concern are identical to Delta, except that they are instead 2.0 and 2.5 times more transmissible than pre-Delta variants. The results presented here are based on multiple assumptions about the transmission rate, age-specific severity of COVID-19, efficacy of vaccines, waning immunity following infection or vaccination, and uptake of an initial two-dose vaccination as well as boosters. They do not represent the full range of uncertainty that the City of Austin may encounter. Our projections suggest that the current hospitalization threshold for transitioning from Stage 2 (blue) to Stage 1 (green) may fail to guard against future variants of concern, and that adding the proposed community transmission criteria for changing stages would substantially reduce the risk of surges that exceed healthcare capacity. We are posting these results prior to peer review to provide intuition for both policy-makers and the public regarding the near-term threat of COVID-19.Integrative Biolog

“They Love Their Patients”: Client Perceptions of Quality of Postabortion Care in North and South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Background: Postabortion care (PAC) is a lifesaving intervention that, when accessible and of good quality, can prevent the majority of abortion-related deaths. However, these services are only sporadically available and often of poor quality in humanitarian settings. CARE International, the International Rescue Committee, and Save the Children strengthened the Congolese Ministry of Health to provide PAC, including voluntary contraceptive services, in North and South Kivu, DRC. Objective: We aimed to gain understanding of the demographic and clinical characteristics of PAC clients, the experiences of women who sought PAC at supported health facilities, and the women’s perceptions of the quality of care received. We also explored how client perspectives can inform future PAC programming. Methods: A PAC register review extracted sociodemographic and clinical data on all PAC clients during a 12-month period between 2015 and 2016 at 69 supported facilities in 6 health zones. In-depth interviews were conducted between September 2016 and April 2017 with 50 women who sought PAC in the preceding 3 months at supported health facilities. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and translated into French for analysis. Thematic content analysis was subsequently used as the data analytic approach. Results: In 12 months, 1,769 clients sought PAC at supported facilities; 85.2% were at less than 13 weeks gestation. Over 80% of PAC clients had a uterine evacuation, and of these, 90% were treated with manual vacuum aspiration. The majority (75.2%) of PAC clients chose voluntary postabortion contraception. All but one interview participant reported seeking PAC for a spontaneous abortion, although most also reported their pregnancy was unintended. Clients were mostly made aware that PAC was available by community health workers or other community members. Experiences at the supported facilities were mostly positive, particularly in regards to client-provider interactions. Most women received contraceptive counseling during PAC and selected a modern method of contraception immediately after treatment. However, knowledge about different methods of contraception varied. Nearly all women said that they would advise another woman experiencing abortion complications to seek PAC at a supported health facility. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the successful implementation of good-quality, respectful PAC in North and South Kivu. Overall, they suggest that the organizations’ support of health workers, including competency-based training and supportive supervision, was successful

Navigating the Shift to Intensive Principal Preparation in Illinois: An In-depth Look at Stakeholder Perspectives

This report from the Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in partnership with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium), assesses the progress of sweeping legislation to redesign the way school principals in Illinois are prepared, with the goal of improving schools statewide through higher quality leadership. The report summarizes findings from a two-year study assessing the progress of these ambitious reforms and describing the changes that occurred as a result of the new policy.https://spark.siue.edu/ierc_pub/1000/thumbnail.jp