This report is a comprehensive study of the status of children and their families in New York City. It measures how well children are doing by using widely recognized indicators of well-being, and it measures the need, use, and accessibility of services to help children. "Keeping Track" focuses on community-level data, examining the 59…

The Co-op/Disadvantaged First-Job Success Project was organized to provide inservice training to vocational teachers and cooperative education coordinators who work with inner city disadvantaged youth in the south central region of Pennsylvania. The project was organized in a manner that allowed project staff, co-op coordinators, and teachers to…

Parents and professional educators agree that reading competence is a necessary prerequisite for successful achievement in nearly all other aspects of the elementary and secondary school curriculum. Successful school achievement is also seen as necessary for later occupational and economic achievement. It is commonly believed that reading failure…

The work-study program at Soldan High School is part of St. Louis' Project Stay, an Elementary Secondary Education Act Title VIII funded dropout prevention program. The project, initiated, in the 1969-70 school year for a five year period has just completed its third year of operation. Three urban schools are involved in the project. The…

The Conference on Improving Minority and At-Risk Student Achievement was convened to help educators, parents, community, and business leaders in North Carolina focus in strategies and ideas that work to raise student achievement levels for low-performing students. This report summarizes the remarks of Michael Garrett, the keynote address of Asa…

Project Discovery II was based on a previous highly successful Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) project called Project Discovery. Teams of high school teachers and college faculty in the project planned and implemented an integrated, discovery based curriculum with groups of block-programmed students in New York City…

Family MAASAI is a multiservice substance abuse prevention and intervention program for African American at-risk urban youth. The program commemorates the Maasai people of Africa and uses MAASAI as an acronym that stands for Maintaining African American Survival, Achievement, and Integrity. Cultural awareness, pride, and respect for self, elders,…

The GEAR UP Austin: Impacting Lives program serves a cohort of approximately 3,369 seventh graders from 10 Austin Independent School District (AISD) middle schools and 28 seventh graders from the Texas Empowerment Academy charter school. More than half of these students come from low-income households, and many are considered at risk. This…

Discusses ways of reducing violence in America involving the integration of scientific approaches and youth violence intervention and community programs that address both family and social environments. The paper argues that these efforts exemplify the notion that violence is more a product of racism and poverty than of race. (GR)

Synthesizes research findings from 10 studies on urban homeless families; and details their demographic characteristics, including the number of children, race, ethnicity, and family composition. Focus is on mothers with children and the effects of homelessness on children. (SLD)

Considers state and national policies directed toward the homeless. Problems with policies for immunization and vaccination requirements, transportation, parent participation, domestic violence, and home schooling are discussed. Alternative solutions that may be more conducive to the education of the homeless are offered. (SLD)

Discusses and illustrates some of the systemic obstacles that youth, particularly urban African-American and Latino youth, confront, focusing on the dynamics of Puerto Rican families and youth. Information on health and housing; elementary school, secondary school, and higher education; and unemployment and the labor force is presented. (SLD)

Rather than viewing youth as an isolated and alienated subculture, it is more useful to view the needs of youth as largely determined by where and how they live, and to recognize that they differ from one another just as adults do. Professionals and volunteers in community youth programs need to understand how the youth they work with experience…

Charter schools are created and managed by an entity composed of parents and/ or teachers, community and/or business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Many people believe that charter schools can provide a high quality education without the regulatory constraints of the conventional public schools. This digest reviews…

The seven short stories in this collection portray the lives of Puerto Rican children and adolescents in the South Bronx (New York City). The hopelessness of many Puerto Rican and Black youth is vividly depicted in stories dealing with drug use, discrimination, unwanted and early pregnancy, and a host of other urban social ills. Titles of the…