On March 30th, 2009, the Urban Institute, with support from the A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, conducted a roundtable discussion entitled "Infants and Toddlers in State and Federal Budgets: Yesterday's Choices, Today's Decisions, and Tomorrow's Options." The event brought together about 40 leading state and federal budget experts, practitioners, and policy-makers including experts in early childhood, health care, and nutrition policies and programs. The aim was to assess the evidence about the effects of state and federal budget choices on young children, to identify immediate opportunities and risks for young children related to the recession and the economic recovery package, and to suggest both short- and longer-term next steps for researchers and policy-makers. The conversation centered on two substantive areas: health and nutrition (particularly Medicaid and WIC) and early care and education. In addition to this podcast, organizers will prepare a conference report outlining insights from the day's proceedings.

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.

A new Child Trends brief helps funders, administrators, and practitioners find evidence-based programs that may be appropriate for their target populations and communities. The Guide provides an overview of 22 resources and 12 searchable online databases that offer information on a range of evidence-based intervention programs.

On July 15, 2009 the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security held a hearing on the "Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support and Education Act" (HR 1064), introduced by Representative Bobby Scott. HR 1064 amends the "Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act of 1974" to asses and develop standards and evidence-based practices to prevent both juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The legislation awards grants to local governments for evidence-based and promising practices for juvenile delinquency prevention and intervention.

On July 14, 2009, President Obama unveiled the American Graduation Initiative, a plan to raise graduation rates, improve facilities, and develop new technology. The plan would allow colleges to improve remedial and adult education programs and integrate developmental classes into academic and vocational classes and provide comprehensive personalized services to help students plan their careers and stay in school.

New York City faces a civic crisis of “disconnected” youth and young adults. There are over 163,000 young people ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor in the labor force. When we add the number of “unemployed” young adults, who are actively seeking work but unable to find it, we have more than 220,000 young people who are not in school nor working—nearly one in five of the total age group. These young people—largely youth of color from poor communities—are at high risk of becoming permanently disengaged from the labor market, threatening their ability to break out of the cycle of poverty and contribute to our economy and community. Their idleness represents a great waste of resources and human potential. The Community Service Society of New York looks offers recommendations.

Too many children experience abuse and neglect with negative lifelong consequences. Too few children get the services and supports they need to heal. Yet, proven and promising practices can reduce maltreatment and ameliorate harm. Taking these practices to scale will require federal investment and leadership in five strategic areas. We must: (1) increase prevention and early intervention services that help keep children and families out of crisis; (2) increase specialized treatment services for those children and families that do experience crisis; (3) increase services to support families after a crisis has stabilized (including birth families, as well as kinship and adoptive families created when parents are unable to care for their children); (4) enhance the quality of the workforce providing services to children and families; and (5) improve accountability both for dollars spent and outcomes achieved. Together these efforts will improve the lives of millions of children across the nation

CLASP facilitates the work of the Communities Collaborating to Reconnect Youth (CCRY) Network. The CCRY Network empowers communities to create effective, innovative partnerships among local youth-serving systems; and it promotes collaboration and peer-to-peer networking among communities across the country in order to share ideas, challenges, lessons, and best practices for reconnecting youth.

In this analysis Public/Private Ventures found that teens who participated more often each week in their Boys and Girls Club showed positive change on 15 of 31 measures. More important than specific programming, interview data suggest that the overall Club environment -- the safe place it provides and supportive interactions with adults and peers were crucial in helping promote teens' positive development.