Improving the Economic and Life Outcomes of At-Risk Youth, Spring 2003

Outlines ideas and strategies for designing programs to engage alienated and disaffected young people in activities designed to help them acquire skills, gain work experience, and improve their lives. Proposes a specific major experimental program

Improving the Economic and Life Outcomes of At-Risk Youth, Fall 2002

This paper outlines ideas and strategies to engage alienated and disaffected young people and help them acquire skills, gain work experience, and improve their lives. Based on lessons learned from three decades of demonstrations and evaluations concerning at-risk youth, the paper presents ideas that government agencies and private foundations could consider when working to fill important service and knowledge gaps. It offers suggestions about how to change the public discourse about young people at risk and how to strengthen the public will to capitalize on this population's strengths and potential. The paper recommends three program strategies, all of which leverage youth-serving institutions and existing funding streams and lay the groundwork to expand programs whose effectiveness has stood the test of evaluation. The fundamental premise of this paper is how to increase youth engagement as a prerequisite to success. It draws upon existing research, the experiences of youth programs that have had unusual success in attracting and retaining enrollees, insights from a youth development perspective, and the observations of youth program practitioners and young people themselves. Recommendations are presented in the areas of goals and framework for action, program design, and broadening public support and building capacity

How Children Used to Work

Discusses the changing role of children in the United States from 1800-1970, focusing on the increasing conflict between child rearing and other activities of parents, the curtailment of child labor, and the decreasing importance of children as a source of old-age financial support for their parents

The Evaluation of Enhanced Academic Instruction in After-School Programs: Findings After the First Year of Implementation

This report presents one-year implementation and impact findings on two supplemental academic instruction approaches developed for after-school settings -- one for math and one for reading. Compared with regular after-school programming, the supplemental math program had impacts on student SAT 10 test scores and the supplemental reading program did not --although the reading program had some effect on reading fluency

Adjustments in Buffalo's labor market

Buffalo (N.Y.) ; Labor market

Independent Directors

Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, under contract no. ED-01-CO-0060/0004 with MDRC

The Benefits and Costs of JTPA Title II-A Programs: Key Findings from the National Job Training Partnership Act Study

This paper examines the benefits and costs of Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) Title II-A programs for economically disadvantaged adults and out-of-school youths. It is based on a 21,000-person randomized experiment conducted within ongoing Title II-A programs at 16 local JTPA Service Delivery Areas (SDAs) from around the country. In the paper, we present the background and design of our study, describe the methodology used to estimate program impacts, present estimates of program impacts on earnings and educational attainment, and assess the overall success of the programs studied through a benefit-cost analysis.