Harlem Children’s Zone,®Inc. has experienced incredible growth - from the number of children we serve to the breadth of our services. But one thing has stayed the same: the agency’s “whatever it takes” attitude when it comes to helping children to succeed.

The organization began 1970 as Rheedlen, working with young children and their families as the city’s first truancy-prevention program.

This publication presents an in-depth look at Annie E. Casey Foundation's investment in the Washington, DC voucher
effort and summarizes results and lessons learned so far. It also includes stories about the
Foundation’s contribution to vouchers in Florida and Milwaukee.

This publication provides an overview of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s investments in chartering along
with selected results and lessons learned. It also presents stories about two successful charter
efforts and Annie E. Casey Foundation's contribution to them.

The Closing the Achievement Gap series explores Casey’s education investments in detail
and presents stories, results, and lessons learned. This particular publication describes Casey’s
efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous results measurement system that enables the
Foundation and its grantees to reflect on practice and then course-correct as necessary to
achieve the desired result. It also presents a list of selected aggregate results to show the
Foundation’s own progress in the area of education results measurement.

A detailed analysis of state-provided data has found racial disparities in health care among the three million New Yorkers in the state’s public insurance programs.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s quarterly Family Economic Success (FES) Newsletter provides updates on activities, developments, and resources in the three major areas of FES—workforce development, family economic supports, and asset building. The goal of Casey's FES work is to promote specific strategies that enable parents to get jobs and advance in the workforce, increase their income, and build and protect a base of assets sufficient to secure a better future for their families.

Children with incarcerated parents are particularly vulnerable because not only are they faced with the trauma of loss, but also the myriad economic and social challenges that parental incarceration can bring. The goals of Annie E Casey Foundation's work in this field are to support and promote effective responses to these challenges.

The Los Angeles Healthy Kids program provides health insurance to low income children in the county who have no other source of coverage (including undocumented children and children above the income limits for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families). These findings from a longitudinal survey of parents of young children in the program indicate that access to medical and dental care for enrolled children increased dramatically over time, use of the emergency room went down, and parents perceived improvements in the health status of their children. This analysis is one piece of a broader Urban Institute evaluation of the program.

During the past year, we have repeatedly heard that the nation's public schools are facing a high school completion crisis. My research at the Urban Institute, for example, reveals an overall graduation rate of 68 percent. Even more troubling, there's only a fifty-fifty chance for a student from a historically disadvantaged minority group to finish, the same odds as flipping a coin (Swanson 2004). But I am not alone in this assessment. Findings from independent studies conducted at a variety of institutions—Johns Hopkins University, Boston College, the Manhattan Institute, and others—all point in a similar direction (Balfanz and Legters 2004; Greene and Foster 2003; Haney et al. 2004). Far too many of our youth, particularly poor and minority students, are failing to complete high school with a diploma.

Reclaiming Futures (RF) is an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that seeks to improve outcomes for drug-involved youth in the juvenile justice system. The first phase of Reclaiming Futures (2002–07) was a ten-site demonstration effort that relied on organizational change and system reform to improve substance abuse interventions for youthful offenders. As part of a national evaluation of Reclaiming Futures, the Urban Institute and Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago conducted biannual surveys in each community participating in the initiative. The surveys measured the quality of juvenile justice and substance abuse treatment systems as reported by expert informants in each community. The pattern of their responses over six survey administrations (December 2003 to June 2006) suggests that RF is a promising strategy for improving substance abuse interventions for youth. Positive and significant changes were reported in all ten RF communities. In several communities, most quality indicators measured by the evaluation improved significantly during the course of the RF initiative.