While only a minority of children who have been abused or neglected engage in delinquent behavior, they are at a significantly higher risk. When youth do become involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, they present unique needs that require collaboration between the numerous systems and people involved in their lives. The…

Objective: Past studies demonstrate a relationship between race and the likelihood of children entering state custody subsequent to a maltreatment investigation. Research also shows that community structural characteristics such as poverty and residential mobility are correlated with entry rates. The combined effect, however, of race and community…

Analysis of interview data illustrates how White adoptive parents rationalize choices regarding adoptee race. Parents who were willing to adopt children of color stressed unwillingness to adopt Black children. The preference for adopting multiracial children goes against the prevalent method of racial classification, hypodescent, by defining…

With the highest incarceration rate in the world, the United States has set an inauspicious precedent. More than 1.7 million American children--one in every 43--have a parent in jail or prison. The generational effects of incarceration are deep and lasting and include vastly increased risks of criminal justice involvement among the children of…

I focus on the role of preschool intervention and developmental psychology researchers in defining the concept of the "disadvantaged child" and in designing and evaluating remedies to alleviate educational "disadvantages" in young children. I argue that preschool interventions concentrated especially on compensating for…

What explains the persistent disparate enrollment of black students in gifted and talented education programs? The bulk of the literature attributes these enrollment patterns to teacher bias against black students, a lack of knowledge about how giftedness manifests itself in black youth, and the apathy of black parents in the identification…

Studies have documented a strong relationship between low birth-weight status and adverse child outcomes such as poor school performance and need for special education services. Following a cohort of more than 1,300 low-income and predominately African American children in the Chicago Longitudinal Study, the authors investigate whether birth…

It's a familiar refrain in American education: African-American children score lower on standardized tests, graduate high school at lower rates, and are considerably more likely to be suspended or expelled than the general population. Two recent reports, one from the Council of the Great City Schools and one from the American Institutes for…

Objective: This longitudinal study followed 5,978 children in out-of-home care to examine whether placement and permanency outcomes differ between children with and without a history of inpatient mental health treatment. Method: Data were drawn from child welfare and Medicaid records from the state of Illinois. Logistic regression and survival…

"Evaluation Science Briefs" summarize the findings and implications of a recent study evaluating the effects of an early childhood program or environment. This Brief evaluates the study "Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability Among African-American Children" (R. Sampson; R. Sharkey; and S. Raudenbush.)…

Chicago's South Side has long been a renowned laboratory for groundbreaking research on Black urban life. The city's vast Black population, largely the product of the Great Migration, has made Chicago the home of both a celebrated Black middle class and an unsettling Black lower class. These two extremes have been meticulously documented over the…

Elementary students from a Chicago housing project rise to the occasion and fight for an equal opportunity after being faced with shamefully, inadequate conditions at their neighborhood school. Challenged with the prospect of co-creating a curriculum based on their priority concerns, the young people developed an integrated effort to solve this…

This report reveals that about 100 Chicago schools suffer from chronically high rates of teacher turnover, losing a quarter or more of their teaching staff every year, and many of these schools serve predominantly low-income African American children. In the typical Chicago elementary school, 51 percent of the teachers working in 2002 had left…

The current study explored the association between a large-scale federally funded preschool intervention and the social and emotional development of participants. Data were drawn from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS) and included 1,378 primarily African American youth who participated in the CLS and had scores for two or more identifiable…

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In "Schools Betrayed", her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to…