Number Of Poor Children Research Articles

Policies to Reduce Child Poverty in Norway: Can Municipalities Ensure Positive Functionings for Children through Housing Policies?

Child poverty is an increasing challenge for Norwegian society and its municipalities. Policies to reduce it include housing as one particularly important health determinant. The capability approach allows us to focus on determinants for health. Methods were triangulated and literature and document studies, interviews and participating observations were part of the data-gathering process. Thematic analyses were used to analyse data. Children and adults view housing as important. Housing determines families’ possibilities of consuming other goods and choosing what functionings they will convert their resources into. Municipalities can change the course of development by engaging with the Norwegian Government Housing Bank and implementing instruments such as social housing, housing allowances and starter loans giving families the possibility to become homeowners. Housing determines intra- as well as inter-generational life chances. Housing is a corrosive functioning if children live in families that have low-quality housing or high housing costs. Housing is a positive functioning for children if families own their housing. Housing is defined as a market good and a welfare asset. Policies enable some families to buy their own housing, whereas the number of poor children still increases.

If We Build it, Will They Come? The Housing Stock and the Socioeconomic Integration of Elementary Schools

Children from poor families achieve more academically if they are enrolled in schools that are socioeconomically integrated, but low-income students are increasingly attending schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. Providing more housing opportunities for low-income families within the attendance zones of middle- and high-income schools has the potential to reverse this trend, but the link between the housing stock and the socioeconomic segregation of public schools has not been addressed in the existing literature. Using a panel of elementary schools in Florida, we show that increasing the stock of rental and affordable housing units in middle- and high-income neighborhoods has an important effect on the number of poor children attending these schools. Our results also reveal the types of housing units that have the largest impacts.

The concept of the 'undeserving poor': pejorative stereotypes and worsening inequalities undermine welfare reform.

I support the current government’s attempts to reform the UK welfare system, which resembles a road to bankruptcy paved with good intentions. However, I take issue with unsympathetic narratives in the press mocking the supposedly undeserving poor, with ‘dole scrounger’ and ‘bogus asylum seeker’ caricatures firmly embedded in the national psyche. Pejorative stereotyping masks what really matters — worsening inequalities, and how politicians are actively complicit in this process. The number of poor children has risen recently,1 yet two-thirds are from working households.2 Over-represented among them are the children of migrant workers,2 whose parents are often on the minimum wage or zero hours contracts, and experiencing hardship and poor health.3 Meanwhile, what remains of the indigenous working class is disenfranchised, with employers opting instead for the migrants. Youth unemployment continues to rise,4 challenging the wisdom of making older people work longer.5 Analysis of social inequality has historically compared …

"Breaking the Chain of Poverty": Family Planning, Community Involvement, and the Population Council-Office of Economic Opportunity Alliance

The Office of Economic Opportunity-Population Council program is an example of a mid-twentieth-century federal government/private foundation cooperative effort to place family planning and maternal health at the center of a fight against entrenched poverty. These joint efforts were the trend in family planning and maternal health provision by the 1960s and had two overlapping but also contradictory goals. The first was to provide contraceptive services to poor women to reduce the numbers of poor children, thus relieving the poor of added mouths to feed. Popular fears of a population explosion, mounting welfare rolls, and an increase in the numbers of African Americans receiving welfare fueled this goal. The second aim, however, was to expand comprehensive maternal health services to help reduce poverty by increasing poor women's involvement in and control over the health institutions that could have significant impact on their lives. While the first goal pivoted on encouraging poor women to bear fewer children, the second sought to integrate poor women into community healthcare delivery systems.

When Schools Close, the Knowledge Gap Grows

Teacher quality? Class size? Parental involvement? Educators have proposed many answers to the achievement puzzle. However, the solutions are masking the true problem: The achievement is not the real threatening our nation's children. There is another, more pernicious gap, one that endangers any hope of equalizing student achievement. This is rooted not in the classroom, but in the learning children do outside of school, including after-school hours, weekends, holidays, and summer breaks. Living in the Information Age, children today gain a remarkable amount of knowledge through their daily reading of books, computers, and other materials on their own time. The information produced each year is astounding. According to one source, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated just in 2006 was 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. (1) This knowledge filters down to children, but in parts. Many children, particularly children from poor communities, live in information-poor neighborhoods, where a lack of resources means they have little access to much information. In a previous study, we found that many poor children have little access to any print materials, including books, newspapers, and magazines. For example, book availability for middle-class children was about 12 books per child; in poor neighborhoods, about one book was available for every 355 children. (2) Poor children traditionally have less access to computers as well. Although computer and Internet use is booming, low-income children are less likely to have access to a computer at home than are their more advantaged peers. (3) The result of access to information is a steadily growing knowledge between rich and poor children. The knowledge gap, we fear, is fueling--and overshadowing--the achievement gap. Without closing one, the other will not go away. EQUAL ACCESS, BUT NOT EQUAL USE The answer seems simple: Give all children equal access to books, computers, and other information sources and the knowledge should close. Not so, we have found. Even if poor children are given equal resources, they do not use materials in the same way their wealthier peers do. Our research starts at the one place that offers all children, rich or poor, equal access to information: the local public library. The nation's public libraries fill a tremendous need by providing print, computers, and other materials to many underserved populations. With more than 95% of all public libraries offering Internet access, about 10% of all Internet users now gain access to the Internet through a public library. (4) And even though poor children are less likely to have computers in their homes, the number of poor children who have frequent access to the Internet through a school or the library is growing steadily. (5) Physical access to a computer, however, does not always guarantee a growth of knowledge. Van Dijk worries about a usage gap and speculates that even when we close gaps in physical access to computers and the Internet, we are still left with unequal practices in the way individuals use them. (6) People with a high level of education, for example, use e-mail and more information, education, work, business, and shopping applications than less educated people. Those with less education use far more entertainment applications. (7) We have found similar results with providing children access to books and computers. In a previous study, we documented differences in the way children from different income levels used information sources such as books and computers. (8) Children from low-income neighborhoods, we found, used just as many resources but often gravitated toward materials with less print and lower reading levels. For every one line of print read by low-income children, middle-income children read three. …

A critical response to Michael Fullan’s “The future of educational change: system thinkers in action”

Michael Fullan has been one of the leading thinkers in school reform and educational leadership for several years. His prominence in the field is well deserved: through numerous books and articles Fullan has presented a complex yet compelling set of arguments and recommendations for addressing the broad array of problems confronting schools and school systems. The clearest evidence of the value of Fullan’s work lies in the fact that his ideas have transcended national boundaries and been embraced in Canada, the US, England and a number of other nations. The insights and wisdom contained in ‘‘The Future of Educational Change: System Thinkers in Action,’’ build upon the impressive intellectual contributions that Fullan has made in the past. In making the case for ‘‘... a fundamentally new kind of leadership in action,’’ Fullan suggests that the accomplishments of educational leaders should not be based upon gains in student achievement, but rather on how many effective leaders they have groomed, mentored and cultivated who can move the system to produce even greater progress. Sustainability is the key for Fullan, and he calls for leaders to become more adept at learning how to ‘‘identify and take into account system context.’’ He then goes on to expound upon eight elements of sustainability that he regards as the central adaptive challenge for leaders who are system thinkers. Despite the potency and profundity of Fullan’s main points, I am forced to recognize that they are almost completely irrelevant to urban and rural school systems in the US and elsewhere that serve large numbers of poor children. This is not because the question of sustainability is not pertinent to such school systems. Rather, the charge of irrelevance lies in the fact that the set of arguments contained in this analysis overlooks the central problems confronting schools in impoverished areas. To claim that these ideas have little relevance to such systems is clearly a significant charge for the institutions where poor children are concentrated are typically the most

Education Vouchers in Spain: The Valencian Experience

This paper presents a description and an economic evaluation of the first Spanish education voucher programme: the nursery voucher system in Valencia. This programme began in 1992 with a moderate budget, but has been slowly developing and at present sets aside 3,282,000€ (2,898,000$)1 to finance the education of more than 5,000 children. This evaluation focuses on the two main objectives proposed by the local government: equality of opportunity in access to education and parental choice. The analysis of the data of the school year 1998-1999 shows that vouchers allow a number of poor children to be schooled as well as allowing a number of parents to choose the school they prefer. However, due to the characteristics and limitations of the Valencian system, these effects are not as significant as may have been expected. Moreover, parents have stated their preference for other public financing mechanisms, such as public provision or subsidies to private schools.

SCIENCE AND SCHOOLS: Urban Districts Grab the Spotlight

SCIENCE AND SCHOOLSThe National Science Foundation's flagship educational effort--the Urban Systemic Initiatives program, launched in 1994 to target the 25 cities with the largest number of poor children in the country--has a big advantage over its statewide programs. City schools are usually run by a single administrator or school board--a definite advantage when you're trying to cut through layers of bureaucracy and overturn the status quo. State systemic efforts, in contrast, must negotiate among several, often competing, sources of power.

Children in Poverty

Eugene M. Lewit, Ph.D., is director of research and grants for economics at the Center for the Future of Children. his T Child Indicators section focuses on children in poverty. The annual Census Bureau report on income and poverty in the United States, issued in September 1992, revealed that 35.7 million people lived in poverty in 1991. Of these impoverished Americans, 13.7 million were children under 18 years of age. During 1991, some 943,000 more children lived in poverty than in 1990, an increase of 7.4%. Because the poverty rate tends to move with the unemployment rate—which continued to rise in 1992 as it had since 1989—it is likely that the number of poor children in the United States is substantially higher today than it was in 1991. Poor children encounter multiple problems during their childhood. They are more likely than their more affluent counterparts to go hungry, to be inadequately housed and clothed, and to receive inadequate medical care as well as insufficient social support. Poor children face increased risk of death, infectious and chronic illness, and injury from accidents and violence. In-depth analyses of the effects of environmental stresses and family problems on children’s mental health suggest that in urban poverty areas, poor children who live with violence, deteriorating housing, and disrupted living conditions are at high risk for depression, low self-confidence, and conflict with peers and authority figures.

General Pediatric Clinic Practice Management: Results of a Survey of Academic Departments

The purpose of this survey is to provide an overview of hospital-based general pediatric clinics (GPCs) from the perspective of the practice manager. Academic pediatric departments located in the United States were surveyed to gather information regarding a number of issues relevant to the operation of their GPCs. These issues include educational efforts related to practice management, personnel allocation, financial performance, organizational formats, administrative arrangements, and access to primary care services for children of poor families. Of 131 surveys, 94 were returned (72% response rate). There were an average of 15,486 visits per year to GPCs, and the number of visits overall has increased by 11.9% during the past 5 years. Educational efforts related to practice management vary greatly within GPCs; less than half report any. The overall staff ratios per faculty physician are similar to those in nonteaching practices but differ in composition because of training activities inherent to GPCs. There is an average loss of $250,000 per clinic at GPCs. Organizational formats vary considerably; the majority of physician directors have no line-management authority for nursing and clerical staff. Survey results confirm that GPCs serve a large number of poor children with 41.3% funded by Medicaid and 16.0% unable to pay out-of-pocket expenses. GPCs are generally not used to teach practice management, tend to lose money, and have little faculty involvement in their management.

Intergenerational Transfers and Public Expenditure on the Elderly in Modern Britain

ABSTRACTIn the United States, much attention has recently been directed to the issue of whether the welfare system has become over-generous to the retired population, at the expense of families with children. The proportion of the US elderly population living in poverty has fallen significantly in the last fifteen years while the number of poor children has increased rapidly, and it has been suggested that this lack of investment in the next generation of workers may have disastrous longterm consequences for the U.S. economy. This paper considers whether similar trends are evident in Britain. It reviews data on the poverty and income of the elderly population, and finds little unequivocal evidence of relative economic gain over the last two decades, although it is clear that many children have suffered from the recent rise in unemployment-induced poverty. It also looks at direct public expenditure on the elderly through both the pension and the health and personal social services systems, and finds no evidence of a transfer of public resources away from children and towards the elderly population. The paper concludes that the British welfare state has been remarkably neutral in its allocation of resources between generations, and that, in the British context, any discussion of inter-generational conflict for welfare resources establishes a false dichotomy, because economic inequality within broad age groups is much greater than inequality between age groups.

Declining family size and the number of children in poor families in the United States: 1964–1983

Change in the number of children in poor white or black families with a male or female as head of the family is examined for the periods 1964–1973, 1973–1978, and 1978–1983. All periods are characterized by declining family size in all four family types. In families with male heads the change in poverty rates specific to family size is generally the major factor behind change in the number of poor children. Declines in family size greatly accelerated declines(or impeded increases) due to changing poverty rates in all three periods. Declining family size also moderated the otherwise large increase in the number of children in poor white and black families with a female head resulting from successive increases in all three periods in the number of white or black female singleparent families. Sizable declines in the number of poor children stemming from further declines in family size are unlikely, but possible changes in fiscal policies that affect marriage and family building by husband-wife couples might reverse policies that may have tended to increase the number of poor children in America in recent decades.

The Use of Architectural Handbooks in the Design of Schoolhouses from 1840 to 1860

tural handbooks by carpenters and amateur architects who wanted to build houses, churches or public buildings, but little about the architectural handbooks provided in large numbers for the use of school districts looking for assistance during the 184os and 50s.1 Although many lectures were given on school matters and pamphlets were published in England and America during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, there was little apparent interest in architectural questions until 1830. Joseph Lancaster, an English schoolmaster who wanted to educate large numbers of poor children, published a floor plan which could be adapted to any large rectangular area so that as many as a thousand children could be accommodated under the eye of pupil monitors. Lancaster came to the United States and lectured, but his system was never widely used, although it occasioned much discussion.