Nearly two-thirds of families are now headed by either two working parents or a single working parent. Accordingly, many parents are forced to choose between their career and economic success, on the one hand, and adequately caring for their children and elderly parents, on the other. Given the unprecedented pressures on families, workers and employers, Americans need more control over their time, as well as more opportunities for skills development.
Children, meanwhile, face challenges of their own. The United States lacks an integrated and comprehensive approach for meeting educational needs during the crucial years of pre-kindergarten through grade 3 -- undermining our ability to give young Americans the skills they will need to thrive in the competitive, high-tech economy of the 21st century.
New America's recent articles, events, policy papers and press coverage on this topic are available below, as is information on our staff and fellows with expertise in this area. To learn more about New America's ideas, proposals and activities, please see our Workforce and Family Program home page, the Education Policy Program's Early Ed Initiative and the Asset Building Program's information on KIDS accounts and the ASPIRE Act.
Policy Papers
If children are the future, then looking at a state's
educational system is like peering into a crystal ball. California is a state teeming with young
children -- 4.7 million under age 8, to be exact. One in every eight young
American children lives in California.
And many of these children come from minority ethnic and racial backgrounds and
speak languages other than English. If Americans want to get a glimpse at our
future as a "majority minority" country they don't have to look beyond California.
October 2009
Introduction/Background
In recent years, the role that savings and
assets play in shaping people's lives has increasingly captured the attention
of researchers, policy analysts and elected officials. Their interest in
savings and building wealth has grown along with an increased awareness of
specific policy tools and interventions, such as matched savings accounts
available for lower-income workers. The launch of the SEED Initiative in
October 2003 was an important marker in this process because it introduced the
Executive Summary
Americans instinctively revere the family as an institution that helps facilitate all other aspects of life. The family fosters attachments across generations, provides a nurturing environment in which to raise children, and is a means of transmitting values from one generation to the next. It is the foundation upon which our social contract has been built.
Executive Summary
Poverty
reduction strategies increasingly focus on the importance of creating
financial assets. Child Savings Accounts (CSAs) are a novel and
promising tool that builds on that focus by promoting savings starting
at a young age. Child Savings Accounts (CSAs) exist as policies,
products, and programs, and are being offered by governments, financial
institutions, and non-profits for a variety of purposes.
INTRODUCTION
Child Savings Accounts (CSAs) exist as policies, products, and programs, and are currently being offered by governments, financial institutions, and non-profits. CSAs are more than basic savings accounts. What distinguishes CSAs from standard savings accounts is the degree to which they serve as means to an end-most often to spur the social and/or economic development of children. Another distinguishing feature is they are often intentionally targeted to children of low- and moderate-income families (as opposed to only children of middle-class… more
Children are a declining priority in the federal budget -- a trend that shows no signs of stopping. In 2007, the federal government paid out $2.7 trillion through spending programs and disbursed roughly another $1 trillion through the tax code. Rapidly expanding entitlement programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- and the country's defense system consumed the largest shares of the budget, while spending on children remained essentially stagnant and did not keep up with growth in the economy.
Our… more
In an economically mobile market economy, individuals and families are able to raise their private incomes, wealth, and ability (sometimes referred to as human capital) over time and across generations. In the United States, many associate economic mobility with the pursuit of the American Dream. Education, work experience, and saving enhance the opportunity for upward economic mobility. To this end, many federal spending and tax expenditure or tax subsidy programs
aim to enhance economic mobility. But exactly how much does the… more
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) seeks to improve student learning and narrow academic achievement gaps that place low-income and minority students at a disadvantage relative to their affluent and white peers. Evidence shows that the roots of children’s academic success or failure are already firmly in place by third grade and as much as half of the black-white achievement gap already exists before children enter first grade. Therefore, to achieve its ambitious goals NCLB must do a much… more
While traditional anti-poverty efforts have focused on maintaining a social safety net to protect the poor, there is a growing recognition that economic well-being hinges on a household’s ability to accumulate a wide range of assets. The value of assets is based not only on the economic security they provide but in how they enable people to make productive investments in their future. This approach has contributed to a wide range of policy proposals designed to help households build assets,… more
The attached document answers the following questions about the America Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement, and Education (ASPIRE) Act:
What does the bill do?Why is a bill to promote asset building for children necessary?
more
Executive Summary
American families confront major challenges in balancing work and family life. Workers report that they would prefer fewer hours, while new technological capabilities require parents to bring more job responsibilities home with them. Mothers and fathers encounter strain in work and home environments alike. Polling and surveillance data confirm that the balance between work and family care needs attention. Some of the most quantifiable and severe costs of this burden on families are adverse health outcomes. This paper… more
The 2008 presidential primary season is shaping up as one unprecedented in American history. Fund-raising reports from the first two quarters of 2007 demonstrate the breakneck pace with which this latest presidential season has begun. Fund-raisers aren’t alone in setting a new pace, as state after state has moved up the date of its Presidential primary in a bid for increased influence.
What has not changed is the focus of the early primary politicking. In the past few weeks, would-be… more
The report released today by the Hoover Institution confirms that insured families across California pay a "hidden tax" to provide uncompensated health care to the uninsured. The existence of this "hidden tax" is no longer in dispute; what's under debate is its magnitude, which is hard to measure precisely because it is "hidden."
This memo describes the range of estimates that various experts have made, highlights some of the reasons for differing judgments, and then lets the reader… more
Click here for a brief video discussion of this idea.
An American Stakeholder Account (ASA), established for every child at birth, would build a savings and ownership culture in America, promote financial literacy, and fortify the American economy for the long haul. Every child would automatically receive a $6,000 deposit into an ASA at birth -- and also… more
Is children’s development, and children’s cognitive development in particular, affected by the marital status of their parents? On the face of it, this seems to be a simple question to which there is an intuitively simple answer: yes. Yet the answer to this question is anything but simple. The complexity of this question, the policy context that has helped shape a growing body of related research, and the implications of findings for policy and practice are discussed below. The following… more
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1) The PK-3 Workforce is Subject to an Array of Entry Standards. Public school teachers in grades K-3 must meet the quality standards of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Pre-kindergarten (PK) teachers in Title I-funded programs also are regulated by NCLB. But Head Start teachers have their own separate entry standards. In some state PK programs, all teachers must possess a bachelor’s degree and have engaged in additional early childhood or PK-3 training. In others,… more
Today nearly 5.7 million grandparents only have to walk downstairs or down the hall to celebrate Grandparents Day with their grandchildren. They are part of a growing
segment of the American population that is living in multigenerational households.
With the increasing demands of a global society, Americans are looking outside the nuclear family and using extended family members to assist with household
responsibilities. Grandparents are helping their children manage their hectic lives and alleviate some of the parenting burden.
For the complete document, please… more
As the FCC dramatically increases fines for indecency over broadcast TV -- and as Congress and the President raise the fine limits by a factor of ten and threaten to extend decency standards to cable and satellite networks -- the debate over how best to protect children from inappropriate media has reached a fever pitch. The problem is real: a plethora of studies show that repeated exposure to violence, inappropriate sexual content and even repeated advertising for junk food can… more
States continue to play an important role in helping low- and moderate-resource families save and build wealth. They have been innovators in assets policy, whether on their own or through the forces of "devolution," in which federal funds and decision-making authority are shifting from the federal to the state level. These initiatives and experiments -- these "laboratories of democracy" -- have inspired and informed other states as well as policymakers at the national level.
The following ideas to broaden savings and… more
Because of the demographic changes of the past generation, dads need more flexibility in their work. Businesses are recognizing that more fathers need flexibility in the workplace and many are giving it.
Businesses should be applauded for that and encouraged to do more in providing workplace flexibility -- and dads deserve credit for the work, balancing and the sacrifices that they make.
For the complete Issue Brief, please see the attached PDF below.
Articles & Books
Recent New America-authored articles, op-eds and books on this topic are featured below.
From the Editors: "Where the Wild Things Are," a film based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, hit theaters on Friday. The book is loved by 4- and 5-year-olds, but this PG-rated movie may well be too scary for them.
Child development experts debate whether, when it comes to the big screen, live-action films are easier for preschoolers to identify with and enjoy than complex animation. But the live-action G-rated movie seems increasingly rare these days.
For eight television seasons (NBC, 1984-92), the Emmy Award-winning The Cosby Show,
written by and starring comedian Bill Cosby, beamed an unflinching, yet
humorous black family portrait into living rooms across America. Cosby,
as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, presided over this historic foray into
black upper-middle class life. The sitcom was a window into a certain,
often enviable kind of black familial and romantic love, a showcase for
amazing talent and a place where the situations or “problems” of a
A few years ago, Newsweek called kindergarten "the new
first grade." This month, as I watch my 5-year-old settle into her
classroom, it's clear the trend hasn't abated. In May, she was kneading
Play-Doh in preschool. Now she has an assigned seat and "guided
reading" lessons.
President Obama's daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don't I?
So asked a pigtailed black girl plastered on buses and billboards
around Washington, D.C. The White House blasted the political ad, which
promoted healthy food options in public schools, as exploitative -- but
the little girl's complaint should resonate with an administration that
has prioritized healthy eating and food security, from both the East
and West Wing of the White House.
World population will hit 7 billion by 2012, according to a recent United Nations report. Given that we just hit the 6 billion mark in October 1999, it is easy to conclude that there are just too many people in the world. How are we ever going to overcome global warming, feed the masses, get that beachfront property, let alone find parking, if the population keeps jumping by nearly one billion per decade?
In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican
candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old
daughter, Bristol,
was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the
reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that
John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor
of the Republican Convention, in St.
Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed,
or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, "Like so many… more
Twenty-one years ago, Daisy Benson brought a gun to an argument. She
says she didn’t mean to shoot, and that may be true, but you bring a
gun to an argument, a lot can go wrong. Daisy was convicted of murder,
given 15 to life, and… more
* This article was excerpted from "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.
The Old Consensus
When Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election by 16 million votes, carrying only six states and faring worse than any major-party candidate since Alf Landon in 1936, nobody seriously entertained the possibility that conservatism would rise from his defeat, let alone that the race might mark the beginning of a… more
Hold the champagne.
Or at least the California sparkling wine.
This week should be a joyous one for those of us who believe in the right to marry the person you love. A month after the California Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage, gay couples will be able to walk into county offices here and secure the same marriage license to which heterosexual couples such as my wife and I are entitled.
Partners are hastily arranging nuptials, and the wedding-industrial… more
In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things… more
The blue-ribbon commission has an inauspicious history in American public policy. Most often, assembling a dozen or two bipartisan grandees to deliberate soberly about a problem for several years is merely a way of evading the problem.
But there are exceptions. Though it will probably pass unnoticed, Dec. 22 of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of one of the most successful policy commissions in modern U.S. history: The National Commission on Children. Chaired by… more
Watching a bunch of gangly middle-schoolers hopping around in their gym clothes at 9 in the morning brought back all sorts of bad memories from my own junior high school days. Still, just by watching Wilmington Middle School students in phys ed class one day last week, I learned a valuable lesson about generosity, voluntarism and just plain common sense.
I went to Wilmington to check out what I thought was a simple yet brilliant idea to help working-class students compete… more
Deep Creek Elementary School is an education success story. In 2001, Deep Creek, where more than three-quarters of students come from low-income families and 80 percent are black or Hispanic, was one of the worst elementary schools in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its third-graders were reading at a first-grade level. But the new principal, Anissa Brown Dennis, expanded collaboration and professional development for teachers, implemented an aligned reading and math curriculum from pre-K through third grade, and offered summer learning and… more
At a recent campaign stop with the Congressional Black Caucus, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account.”
That was enough to generate a few headlines and some right-wing outrage. The Drudge Report was quick to tweak one of its favorite targets and drive some Internet traffic with a bold banner, “A Bond for Every Bassinet.”
The conservative Washington Times and New York Post blasted the idea within 24… more
Many churches are developing programs to serve young adults. Many are investing in young adult coordinators in order to help grow their church.
However, there is another reason for churches to focus on young adults -- the critical needs of the early young adult population in our nation.
The violence at Virginia Tech last April perpetrated by a disturbed young adult is a tragedy beyond belief. It calls attention to the challenges faced by an often overlooked age group.
While American society… more
One of the great fears that parents and church leaders have about their youth engaging in interfaith dialog is that they will lose their connection to their own religion and will end up rejecting and leaving their faith, maybe even converting to another religion as a result. My experience as a Christian pastor has been just the opposite -- I have watched young people become stronger in their own faith through exposure to other traditions.
Personal relationships matter a great deal… more
Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, has a curious new idea -- or, more precisely, an old one. No longer will it use wads of Chinese cash recycled through Wall Street to make subprime loans to unqualified borrowers. Instead, it will take in deposits from small savers and lend them out to people who might actually repay them -- just like that humble thrift institution president George Bailey did in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Imagine: a bank that promotes thrift!… more
In a few days, Congress will return to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. The program will pay for expanded coverage for children through an increase in cigarette taxes. The logic is to raise revenue while discouraging a behavior harmful to child health. Instead of a cigarette tax, however, Congress should address the health problem that research indicates is the greatest crisis facing America’s young people by taxing junk food instead.
The new epidemic facing American children… more
Anyone who's ever been to a wedding knows not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now, and he's become so well known… more
All books, cover stories and other articles by New America authors can be found in the Publications section.
Events
Policies to Help Small Communities in Forgotten Places
November 12, 2009
Strategies to Thrive in Tough Economic Times
July 17, 2009
A New America Foundation/Zócalo Event
July 9, 2009
Creating Opportunity for Low-Wage Workers
July 8, 2009
The 2009 Child Well Being Index
June 2, 2009
Workplace Flexibility and Mental Health and Wellness - Cosponsored by the Congressional Mental Health Caucus
May 20, 2009
Staying Healthy, Wealthy and Wise in Challenging Times
February 9, 2009
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How Early Efforts for Education, Health and Safety Make a Critical Difference in the Well-Being of Children
September 8, 2008
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The 2008 Child Well-Being Index
July 21, 2008
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Is Paid Parental Leave an Effective Means of Promoting Gender Equity in the Workplace?
November 15, 2007
The Problem & the Need for Creative Action
October 3, 2007
Portraits of the Near Poor In America
October 1, 2007
The Real Costs to Parent and Child Health
September 19, 2007
How Do American Children Fare in Comparison to Children in Other Countries?
June 28, 2007
Experts
David Gray is Director of the Workforce and Family Program at the New America Foundation, which seeks to advance innovative, market-oriented ideas that improve life for workers and strengthen families while enhancing the competitiveness of the American economy. Rev. Gray works on a broad set of policy issues from globalization… more
Gray is New America's primary contact for this issue. All fellows and staff with expertise in this area are listed below in alphabetical order.
Schwartz Senior Fellow
Director, Workforce and Family Program
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray directs the New America
Foundation's Workforce and Family Program, which researches and
develops solutions to social, economic and family policy issues.
Federal Policy Liaison, Asset Building Program
As Federal Policy Liaison of the Asset
Building Program at the New America
Foundation, Justin King is at the fore of efforts to educate
policymakers in the legislative and executive branches about broadening asset
ownership in the United
States. He works closely with the leadership
of New America to devise… more
Senior Research Fellow, Economic Growth Program, and Research Director, Next Social Contract Initiative
Phillip Longman is a
Senior Research Fellow, currently concentrating on health care policy,
including delivery system reform, environmental, and nutritional factors
affecting public health. His work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Der Spiegel, The
Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, The
New Republic, The New Statesman, The New… more
Irvine Fellow
Douglas
McGray writes about social and international issues, technology, and culture
for Public Radio International's This American Life, The New York
Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly,
the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Wired, The
Washington Post, Mother Jones and The Economist. His
work has been profiled on the cover of Time Asia… more
Senior Research Fellow, Education Policy Program and Workforce and Family Program
As a Senior
Research Fellow with the New America Foundation, Sara Mead conducts research and
writes about early childhood and elementary and secondary education, with a
particular focus on state and federal policy issues including preschool,
PreK-3rd education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, federal
education funding, charter schools… more
Press
| Do Parents Worsen Childhood Fears? | Dr. Nancy (MSNBC) | October 23, 2009 |
| Iran's Openness to Nuclear Compromise Debated | Global Security Newswire | October 15, 2009 |
| 529s | Wall Street Journal | October 4, 2009 |
| Prepaid College Savings Plans Might Not Cover All Costs | New York Times | October 4, 2009 |
| Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs | The Ledger | September 20, 2009 |
| Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs | New York Times | September 19, 2009 |
| National Winner Named in New America's 2009 Improving the Lives of Children Essay Contest | June 15, 2009 |
| One in Five Children Sinking into Poverty | People's Weekly World | June 4, 2009 |
| One in Five Children Sinking Into Poverty | Inter Press Service | June 3, 2009 |
| 10 Finalists Named in New America's 2009 Improving the Lives of Children Essay Contest | May 19, 2009 |
| 25 Semifinalists Named in New America's 2009 Improving the Lives of Children Essay Contest | April 16, 2009 |
| US Needs Pact Based on Family | Washington Times | March 14, 2009 |
| GAO: Pentagon Health Records Don't Compute | Mother Jones | March 13, 2009 |
| Children and Technology | New Hampshire Public Radio | March 10, 2009 |
| American Family Needs Some Help | Washington Times | March 7, 2009 |
| TV's Not the Big Bad Wolf | WashingtonPost.com | March 5, 2009 |
| Working Families and the California Budget Deficit | KPFA Berkeley | January 13, 2009 |
| Tongue-Tied: Americans Lack Multi-Lingual Edge | December 11, 2008 |
| David Gray in The Washington Examiner | 'Mothers-in-Law: A Think Tank’s Take' | November 24, 2008 |
| Phillip Longman in the Windsor Star | 'A Brood and the Brass Ring' | November 14, 2008 |