Drawing on J. Epstein's theory of overlapping spheres of influence (1991, 1995), this study explores the effects of teacher, family, and church support on the school-related attitudes, behaviors, and academic achievement of African American, urban adolescents. To achieve this objective, 826 students in an urban school district in the southeastern…

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…

The school readiness goal of the America 2000 educational reform program admits that not all children start school ready to learn, but implies that with proper and adequate interventions, all children can start with the requisite cognitive and social adaptive skills that will enable them to learn. This paper discusses and analyzes critical skills…

This final report attempts to capture the work and atmosphere of the recent symposium convened by Motivational Educational Entertainment, Inc. (MEE), a black-owned communications research, consulting, and video production company. In its commitment to helping urban youth, MEE conducted a study of the "hip-hop" generation and its…

This publication, the third in a series of annual updates concerning young children and their families living in poverty in the United States, incorporates new statistical information from the 1992 March Supplement to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The data provide an estimate of family poverty status for 1991 as measured by the…

This paper considers whether ethnicity is a social construction that is constantly being recreated in a nexus of shifting social relations rather than a set of perceptions and behaviors that remain constant and stem from a youth's membership in an ethnic group. Student responses about ethnicity from a larger study of student role and engagement in…

This paper offers an analysis of urban youth gangs and intervention and prevention strategies for schools, and describes an example of a Cleveland (Ohio) school-wide response. After reviewing the scope of the problem and recent attention to gangs and youth violence, the paper looks at why youth join gangs and lists 12 conditions. Another section…

How ethnic identity and gender figure in building the embedded identities of youth in different contexts is examined, focusing on the self-concepts of inner-city youth. The voices of urban youth argue that their embedded identities, or multilayered self-conceptions, represent far more than simple labels of ethnic or racial membership. After an…

In 1992 CityMatCH, a national organization of urban maternal and child health programs and leaders, initiated a survey of programs to serve as an information resource for urban public health practitioners. This report updates previous data, presents baseline information on maternal and child health (MCH) programs in urban health departments…

In Talent Development Middle Schools, students needing extra help in mathematics participate in the Computer- and Team-Assisted Mathematics Acceleration (CATAMA) course. CATAMA is an innovative combination of computer-assisted instruction and structured cooperative learning that students receive in addition to their regular math course for about…

Success for All (SFA), a schoolwide research-based reform model developed by Robert Slavin and his associates at Johns Hopkins University, is based on the premise that all students can and must succeed in the early grades. The program targets students in the lower grades, providing them with intensive instruction in language arts. This effort is…

This paper reports on three projects in California that have attempted to stem the tide of Latino dropouts and increase the college-going rates of the Latino population. Each of these three programs has tested a set of strategies aimed at increasing the educational attainment of Latino students, who now make up the largest single ethnic group in…

This document contains the detailed tables that complement a one-page report with statistics on U.S. residents enrolled in school by a variety of characteristics. The set of detailed tabulations consists of 19 tables from the 1996 October Current Population Survey and 7 historical tables. Data in the tables are estimated based on a sample survey…

A total of 948 minority children of 2-5 years of age from inner-city areas of Newark, New Jersey participated in a study that aimed to identify gifted preschool children. The study was designed to develop and validate a screening instrument and establish an enrichment program that would nurture the unique abilities of the gifted children. The…

This report documents the problems of Black and Latino males in New York City by assembling a broad range of data regarding the connections between the City's Black and Latino men and its social and economic institutions. The report draws primarily on data from federal surveys and administrative data from New York City and New York State agencies.…