Laggards in Our Schools presents the findings of a 1907 study on disabled children and the effects of education on their early years. The study analyzed the specifics of the children’s’ conditions and what factors caused them to drop behind in school, as well as to what extent attendance, homework, and other methods affected progress.
LEONARD P. AYRES was director of the Division of Education at the Russell Sage Foundation.
A look into the rising cost of education, Trends of School Costs was published in 1920. It analyzes the different aspects at play in the cost of public school education, including the relationship between growing attendance rates and cost. Of prime importance are trends in teachers' salaries, compared to the cost of living and the salaries of other workers. Future pricing trends are predicted.
W. RANDOLPH BURGUESS, Department of Education, Russell Sage Foundation
Recent research on job quality and work-life balance shows that work schedules can facilitate or hinder workers’ efforts to arrange caregiving, pursue an education, secure a second job, maintain meaningful relationships, and earn an adequate income. Non-standard work hours and the lack of control over hours of work is negatively associated with family routines, marital quality, child care and child wellbeing, worker health and job performance.
As millions of baby boomers retire and age in the coming years, more American families will confront difficult choices about the long-term care of their loved ones. The swelling ranks of the disabled and elderly who need such support—including home care, adult day care, or a nursing home stay—must often interact with a strained, inequitable and expensive system. How will American society and policy adapt to this demographic transition?
In Universal Coverage of Long-Term Care in the United States, editors Nancy Folbre and Douglas Wolf and an acclaimed group of care researchers offers a much-needed assessment of current U.S. long-term care policies, the problems facing more comprehensive reform, and what can be learned from other countries facing similar care demands. After the high-profile suspension of the Obama Administration’s public long-term insurance program in 2011, this volume, the Foundation’s first free e-book, includes concrete suggestions for moving policy toward a more affordable and universal long-term care coverage in America.
David Bell is a Professor of Economics in the Stirling Management School at the University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland.
Alison Bowes is a Professor in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland.
Leonard Burman is the Daniel P. Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.
Brian Burwell is Vice President for Community Living Systems at Thomson Reuters, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marc A. Cohen is Chief Research and Development Officer of LifePlans, Inc., in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Svein Olav Daatland is Senior Researcher at NOVA/Norwegian Social Research, in Oslo, Norway.
Nancy Folbre is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Mary Jo Gibson, formerly a Strategic Policy Adviser at AARP's Public Policy Institute, is a long-term care consultant.
Howard Gleckman is a Resident Fellow at The Urban Institute, where he is affiliated with both the Tax Policy Center and the Program on Retirement Policy.
Robert Hudson is Professor and Chair of Social Welfare Policy in Boston University’s School of Social Work.
Carol Levine is Director of the Families and Health Project at the United Hospital Fund, New York City.
David Stevenson is an Associate Professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.
Robyn Stone is Executive Director of the Center for Applied Research and Senior Vice President of LeadingAge in Washington, D.C.
Eileen J. Tell is Senior Vice President of Univita (formerly the Long Term Care Group, Inc.), in Natick, Massachusetts.
Douglas Wolf is the Gerald B. Cramer Professor of Aging Studies and Director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies at Syracuse
Robyn I. Stone discusses the long-term care workforce in America, its challenges and potential reforms for improvement. Read the Interview
Carol Levine discusses her personal experience as a family caregiver, and how policy must change to better support friends and family who offer unpaid care. Read the Interview
Douglas Wolf offers an overview of Universal Coverage and outlines possible reforms to improve the provision of long-term care in America. Read the Interview
In the course of its television lifetime, "Sesame Street" has taught alphabet-related skills to hundreds of thousands of preschool children. But the program may have attracted more of its regular viewers from relatively affluent homes in which the parents were better educated. Analyzing and reevaluating data drawn from several sources, principally the Educational Testing Service's evaluations of "Sesame Street," the authors of this book open fresh lines of inquiry into how much economically disadvantaged children learned from viewing the series for six months and into whether the program is widening the gap that separates the academic achievement of disadvantaged preschoolers from that of their more affluent counterparts. The authors define as acute dilemma currently facing educational policymakers: what positive results are achieved when a large number of children learn some skills at a younger age if this absolute increase in knowledge is associated with an increase in the difference between social groups?
THOMAS D. COOK is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair of Ethics and Justice and professor of sociology, psychology, and education and social policy at Northwestern University.
Now considered a classic in the field, this book first called attention to what Kanter has referred to as the "myth of separate worlds." Rosabeth Moss Kanter was one of the first to argue that the assumes separation between work and family was a myth and that research must explore the linkages between these two roles.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.
Concentrates on the historical, statutory, judicial, and administrative aspects of philanthropic foundations. It begins with a general survey of the rise of foundations, particularly as a legal concept, and examines existing provisions for state registration and supervision, with special atention to the role of the attorney general. There are field reports on ten states with programs aimed at following charitable activities closely.
The concluding chapter provides appraisals and recommendations, and appendices include state legal requirements for charitable trusts and corporations, selected state acts, rules, reporting forms, and a list of cases.
MARION R. FREMONT-SMITH is a practicing attorney in Boston.
“Douglas Massey and Stefanie Brodmann provide an ambitious and rigorous examination of how inequality exerts its influence in the lives of young Americans. Analyzing a national longitudinal study and focusing on multiple social contexts—including school, religion, peers, and neighborhoods—the authors discover important new facts and evaluate competing explanations for a diverse set of outcomes. Whether about depression, crime, sexual behavior, obesity, drinking, or human capital attainment, the results are fascinating. Spheres of Influence should be required reading for social scientists and policymakers seeking comprehensive knowledge on the social ecology of class and race inequality.”
—Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University
“Spheres of Influence is a pathbreaking book exposing the vast complexities in how race and class intersect in affecting development and well-being as people move from adolescence into adulthood in the United States. The comprehensiveness of the theory and findings about the ways that highly diverse social ecologies of family, school, neighborhood, peers, and religion set the stage for vast inequalities in social outcomes is unparalleled.”
—Lauren J. Krivo, professor of sociology and criminal Justice, Rutgers University
The black-white divide has long haunted the United States as a driving force behind social inequality. Yet, the civil rights movement, the increase in immigration, and the restructuring of the economy in favor of the rich over the last several decades have begun to alter the contours of inequality. Spheres of Influence, co-authored by noted social scientists Douglas S. Massey and Stefanie Brodmann, presents a rigorous new study of the intersections of racial and class disparities today. Massey and Brodmann argue that despite the persistence of potent racial inequality, class effects are drastically transforming social stratification in America.
This data-intensive volume examines the differences in access to material, symbolic, and emotional resources across major racial groups. The authors find that the effects of racial inequality are exacerbated by the class differences within racial groups. For example, when measuring family incomes solely according to race, Massey and Brodmann found that black families’ average income measured $28,400, compared to Hispanic families’ $35,200. But this gap was amplified significantly when class differences within each group were taken into account. With class factored in, inequality across blacks’ and Hispanics’ family incomes increased by a factor of almost four, with lower class black families earning an average income of only $9,300 compared to $97,000 for upper class Hispanics. Massey and Brodmann found similar interactions between class and racial effects on the distribution of symbolic resources, such as occupational status, and emotional resources, such as the presence of a biological father—across racial groups. Although there are racial differences in each group’s access to these resources, like income, these disparities are even more pronounced once class is factored in.
The complex interactions between race and class are apparent in other social spheres, such as health and education. In looking at health disparities across groups, Massey and Brodmann observed no single class effect on the propensity to smoke cigarettes. Among whites, cigarette smoking declined with rising class standing, whereas among Hispanics it increased as class rose. Among Asians and blacks, there was no class difference at all. Similarly, the authors found no single effect of race alone on health: Health differences between whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks were small and non-significant in the upper class, but among those in the lower class, intergroup differences were pronounced.
As Massey and Brodmann show, in the United States, a growing kaleidoscope of race-class interactions has replaced pure racial and class disadvantages. By advancing an ecological model of human development that considers the dynamics of race and class across multiple social spheres, Spheres of Influence sheds important light on the factors that are currently driving inequality today.
DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.
STEFANIE BRODMANN is an economist at the Social Protection and Labor Unit of the World Bank.
In January 1980 a panel of distinguished social scientists and statisticians assembled at the National Academy of Sciences to begin a thorough review of the uses, reliability, and validity of surveys purporting to measure such subjective phenomena as attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and preferences. This review was prompted not only by the widespread use of survey results in both academic and non-academic settings, but also by a proliferation of apparent discrepancies in allegedly equivalent measurements and by growing public concern over the value of such measurements.
This two-volume report of the panel’s findings is certain to become one of the standard works in the field of survey measurement. Volume I summarizes the state of the art of surveying subjective phenomena, evaluates contemporary measurement programs, examines the uses and abuses of such surveys, and candidly assesses the problems affecting them. The panel also offers strategies for improving the quality and usefulness of subjective survey data. In volume II, individual panel members and other experts explore in greater depth particular theoretical and empirical topics relevant to the panel’s conclusions.
For social scientists and policymakers who conduct, analyze, and rely on surveys of the national state of mind, this comprehensive and current review will be an invaluable resource.
CHARLES F. TURNER is professor of Applied Social Research at the City University of New York.
ELIZABETH MARTIN is research associate at the National Research Council.
CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson, Barbara A. Bailar, Marian Ballard, Theresa J. Demaio, Otis Dudley Duncan, Baruch Fischhoff, Lester R. Frankel, William H. Kruskal, Michael B. Mackuen, Catherine Marsch, Elizabeth Martin, Sara B. Nerlove, Howard Schuman, Tom W. Smith, Charles F. Turner
A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology
Winner of the 2015 Grawemeyer Award for the Best Book in Education
Honorable Mention, 2016 Robert E. Park Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section
“A fitting capstone for the efforts of a remarkable team of collaborators and their longitudinalstudy of working class children growing up in Baltimore.”
—GREG J. DUNCAN, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine
“The Long Shadow profoundly challenges our understanding of schooling in the lives of disadvantaged urban children, black and white. They and their more privileged classmates are followed from first grade into young adulthood. Numerous policy- relevant observations emerge, including the
persistence of first grade inequalities and the recurrence of summer setbacks in learning. This is an essential book for all who care about children’s education.”
—GLEN H. ELDER, JR., Howard W. Odum Research Professor of Sociology and Research Professor of Psychology, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential “inner city”—gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual “urban underclass” depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson present a more nuanced portrait of Baltimore’s inner city residents that employs important new research on the significance of early-life opportunities available to low-income populations. The Long Shadow focuses on children who grew up in west Baltimore neighborhoods and others like them throughout the city, tracing how their early lives in the inner city have affected their long-term well-being. Although research for this book was conducted in Baltimore, that city’s struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation.
For 25 years, the authors of The Long Shadow tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults. The authors’ fine-grained analysis confirms that the children who lived in more cohesive neighborhoods, had stronger families, and attended better schools tended to maintain a higher economic status later in life. As young adults, they held higher-income jobs and had achieved more personal milestones (such as marriage) than their lower-status counterparts. Differences in race and gender further stratified life opportunities for the Baltimore children. As one of the first studies to closely examine the outcomes of inner-city whites in addition to African Americans, data from the BSSYP shows that by adulthood, white men of lower status family background, despite attaining less education on average, were more likely to be employed than any other group in part due to family connections and long-standing racial biases in Baltimore’s industrial economy. Gender imbalances were also evident: the women, who were more likely to be working in low-wage service and clerical jobs, earned less than men. African American women were doubly disadvantaged insofar as they were less likely to be in a stable relationship than white women, and therefore less likely to benefit from a second income.
Combining original interviews with Baltimore families, teachers, and other community members with the empirical data gathered from the authors’ groundbreaking research, The Long Shadow unravels the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations to reveal a startling and much-needed examination of who succeeds and why.
KARL ALEXANDER is John Dewey Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.
The late DORIS ENTWISLE was Research Professor in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.
LINDA OLSEN is associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
