The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1909 through November 1910 cover topics such as Christmas giving, medical education in America, the training of social workers, and tuberculosis and relief.
This booklet discusses the reasons for the slowing of students’ progress in schools. It includes a text reprinted from the tenth annual report of Dr. William H. Maxwell, superintendent of schools of New York City, as well as an investigation by Leonard P. Ayres, with the assistance of Luther Halsey Gulick, into this problem in fifteen schools in Manhattan.
LEONARD P. AYRES was director of the Division of Education at the Russell Sage Foundation.
LUTHER HALSEY GULICK was director of physical training of the New York public schools.
WILLIAM H. MAXWELL was superintendent of schools of New York City.
This booklet was reprinted from the Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Tuberculosis for the Russell Sage Foundation. It discusses detecting tuberculosis in the public schools and educating students about the disease.
LUTHER HALSEY GULICK was director of physical training of the New York public schools.
A form listing people and places—including churches, employers, medical agencies, and public officials—that social agencies might have visited with columns for noting the number of visits to each. An explanation following the list notes that agencies using the largest number of outside sources of information will be seen as having made the best investigation into the cases they are treating.
This booklet discusses what 1,038 U.S. cities are doing for the health of school children. The first part discusses medical inspection, including the history of medical inspection, administration, and kinds of medical inspection. The second part covers hygiene of the school room, including outdoor recesses, individual drinking cups and sanitary fountains, modern methods of dusting and sweeping, and instruction in alcohol, tobacco, tuberculosis, and first aid.
This article from The Psychological Clinic, reprinted as an RSF booklet the same year, attempts to examine possible relations between physical disability and school progress in children.
LEONARD P. AYRES was director of the Division of Education at the Russell Sage Foundation.
"When Care Is Conditional brings together trenchant analysis and deeply moving humanity to understand the barriers faced by Latinx immigrants and their strategies for well-being as they negotiate conditional care in the United States. Through nuanced research and the voices of ordinary people, Dani Carrillo shows how immigration policy, residential location, and, especially, gender shape who can get help, how much, and under what conditions. Beautifully written, this book is a must-read for scholars, policymakers, and philanthropists dedicated to advancing everyone’s well-being."
—IRENE BLOEMRAAD, Class of 1951 Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
"When Care Is Conditional is a critical reassessment of the failure of social protection in the United States through the lens of low-wage immigrants. Dani Carrillo offers a bottom-up examination of the patchwork of safety net institutions and the perennial difficulty of accessing them. In doing so, she disrupts the idyllic view of the suburbs and reveals how immigrant networks and civil society try to help fill in the gap. More than just a structural accounting, this book centers the importance of cultural narratives and stigmas in reinforcing 'conditional care' and in doing so helps us understand the dynamics of exclusion for all vulnerable racialized communities."
—SHANNON GLEESON, Edmund Ezra Day Professor and chair, Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History, Cornell University
"Dani Carrillo deftly weaves policy history with personal narratives of Latinx immigrants to lay bare how restrictive immigration policies undermine the well-being of families that too often are living in the shadows of our communities and society. The book comes at a critical time in our national, state, and local dialogue around immigration and social policy. When Care Is Conditional is critical reading for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike."
—SCOTT W. ALLARD, Associate Dean for Research and Engagement and Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington
From its inception, the public safety net in the United States has excluded many people because of their race, gendered roles, or other factors. As a result, they must prove their moral worthiness to get resources for themselves and their families. In When Care Is Conditional, sociologist Dani Carrillo reveals the ramifications of this conditional safety net by focusing on one particularly vulnerable population: undocumented immigrants.
Through in-depth interviews with Latinx immigrants in northern California, Carrillo examines three circumstances—place, gender, and immigration status—that intersect to influence an individual’s access to health care, food assistance, and other benefits. She demonstrates that place of residence affects undocumented immigrants’ ability to get care since more services are available in urban areas, where many immigrants cannot afford to live, than suburban areas, where public transportation is limited. She also shows that while both men and women who are undocumented have difficulty obtaining care, men often confront more challenges. Undocumented women who are pregnant or mothers are eligible for some government safety net programs and rely on informal coethnic networks or a “guiding figure”—a relative, friend, neighbor, or coworker—who explains how to get care and makes them feel confident in accessing it. Most undocumented men, in contrast, are not eligible for public programs except in a medical emergency and often lack someone to guide them directly to care. Men sometimes steer one another to jobs through worker centers—where they may learn about various services and take advantage of those that increase their employability, like English or computer classes—but a culture of masculinity leads them to downplay medical problems and seek health care only in a crisis.
As undocumented immigrants navigate this exclusionary system, Carrillo finds that they resist the rhetoric stigmatizing them as lawbreakers. Dismissing the importance of “papers” and highlighting their work ethic, they question the fairness of U.S. immigration policies and challenge ideas about who deserves care.
Carrillo offers concrete recommendations, such as improving labor conditions and reexamining benefit eligibility, to increase access to care for not only undocumented immigrants but also people who have been excluded because of their race, criminal record, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. She argues that working with and across populations creates a powerful form of solidarity in advocating for inclusive care.
When Care Is Conditional provides compelling insights into how safety net and immigration policies intersect to affect people’s everyday lives and calls for a cultural shift so that the United States can provide unconditional care for all.
DANI CARRILLO is a senior researcher and civic technologist.
This booklet outlines the social work of the state of Florida. Among the topics discussed are war activities, care of soldiers and their families, food conservation, education in patriotism, administration of boards and institutions, the public health service, the prison system, infant mortality, child labor, recreation, public education, and care of the poor.
HASTINGS H. HART was the director of the Department of Child-Helping at the Russell Sage Foundation.
CLARENCE L. STONAKER was a staff member of the State Charities Aid and Prison Reform Association of New Jersey.
"The elite-level battle over the Affordable Care Act has consumed a decade, the ACA has transformed millions of lives—mostly for the better—and yet Daniel Hopkins’s brilliant new book, Stable Condition, shows that all this has barely moved a polarized public. What does this ‘stable condition’ mean for politicalscience and policymaking alike? Read this fascinating book to find out."
—JACOB S. HACKER, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, Yale University
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), the sweeping health care reform enacted by the Obama Administration in 2010, continues to be a contentious policy at the center of highly polarized political debates. Both before and after the law’s passage, political elites on both sides of the issue attempted to sway public opinion through two traditional approaches: messaging and policymaking itself. They operated under the assumption that the public’s personal experiences toward the law would make them more favorable. Yet these tried-and-true methods have had limited influence on public attitudes toward the ACA. Public opinion towards the ACA remained stable from 2010 to 2016, with more Americans opposing the law than supporting it. It was only after Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and the prospect of the law being repealed became a reality that public opinion swung in favor of the ACA. If traditional methods of influencing public opinion had little impact on attitudes towards the ACA, what did? In Stable Condition, political scientist Daniel J. Hopkins draws on survey data from 2009 to 2020 to assess how a variety of factors such as personal experience, political messaging, and partisanship did or did not affect public opinion on the ACA.
Hopkins finds that although personal experience with the ACA’s Medicaid expansion increased favorability among low-income Americans, it did not have a broader overall impact on public opinion. Personal experience with the Health Insurance Marketplace did not increase wider support for the ACA either. Due to the complex nature of the law, users of the Marketplace often did not realize they were benefiting from the ACA. Therefore, perceptions of the Marketplace were shaped by high-profile issues with the enrollment website and opposition to the individual mandate. These experiences ultimately offset one another, resulting in little discernable change in public opinion overall. Hopkins argues that political polarization was also responsible for elite’s limited influence and that public opinion on the ACA was largely determined by partisanship and political affiliation. Americans quickly aligned with their party’s stance on the law and were resistant to changing their beliefs despite the efforts of political elites.
Stable Condition is an illuminating examination of the limits of elites’ influence and the forces that shaped public opinion about the Affordable Care Act.
DANIEL J. HOPKINS is a professor of political science at University of Pennsylvania.
Algorithms–rules written into software–shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person’s traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?
Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software — exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm – a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.
Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.
DAVID G. ROBINSON is a visiting scholar at the Social Science Matrix at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty at Apple University. From 2018 to 2021, he developed this book as a Visiting Scientist at Cornell’s AI Policy and Practice Project. Earlier, Robinson co-founded and led Upturn, an NGO that partners with civil rights organizations to advance equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of digital technology.