Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies Program

Introduction

This interdisciplinary program, led by Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law, combines the interests of IPR faculty studying the ways in which social programs, policies, and contexts affect the lives of families and children from birth to young adulthood. Drawn from the fields of human development and social policy, psychology, sociology, economics, and law, many faculty share common interests with scholars in IPR’s Poverty, Race, and Inequality program—particularly in studying the impact of public policies on America’s poor families. Research in this area includes:

Overview of Activities

Welfare Reform
It has been over a decade since President Clinton signed welfare reform into law creating Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It mandated welfare-to-work policies and time limits on assistance. IPR faculty have been instrumental in researching how welfare reform has affected poor families. Of specific concern to policymakers is how welfare reform affects children’s social and cognitive development, given the importance of early development to later success in life.

In Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, co-directed by developmental psychologist P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, the researchers interviewed and directly assessed some 2,400 families in 1999 and 2001. The study, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Annie E. Casey Foundation, Joyce Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Searle Fund for Policy Research, found that in the short run and when economic times are good, welfare-to-work programs neither significantly help nor hurt children or adolescents in low-income families whose mothers leave welfare to go to work.

With support from NICHD, the researchers are analyzing a third wave of data collected from home-based interviews. At the time the interviews were conducted, half of the children from the first wave of the study were in elementary school (aged 6 to 10), and the other half were adolescents (aged 16 to 20) who were making the transition to young adulthood and either were enrolled in, graduated from, or had dropped out of high school.

The Three-City Teacher Survey (TCTS) is a Web-based survey of the teachers of children and adolescents in the Three-City Study. These teachers have provided independent assessments of the youths’ academic and social functioning and their schooling experiences. Combining the new TCTS data with extensive in-home interviews and direct assessments from the Three-City Study will create a rich and comprehensive data set on how low-income urban adolescents have adapted to welfare reform over the long term. All three waves of data from the in-home interviews will be publicly available from Sociometrics in 2008. The TCTS data set will be available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. The Annie E. Casey Foundation and Searle Fund for Policy Research supplemented NICHD funding for this portion of the study.

In the Next Generation Study, a random-assignment evaluation of 16 welfare-to-work programs supported by NICHD, economist Greg Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy, and fellow researchers at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and the University of Texas-Austin are studying the policy impacts on children and youth as well as addressing more fundamental developmental issues such as the role of income and childcare on child and youth development. Some of the findings by Duncan and his colleagues include:

• Modest improvements in school achievement for younger children (aged 2 to 5) in families that were offered earnings supplements. This was perhaps due to the increased use of center-based childcare arrangements.

• Poorer outcomes for adolescents in families affected by welfare reform. The adolescents did worse in school, repeated grades more often, and used more special educational services than the control group. Teen childbearing was not affected. Adolescents with younger siblings had the most trouble, perhaps because they were also more likely to take care of their siblings.

Duncan is leading an eight-year follow-up of New Hope, a work-support program in Milwaukee, which received funding from NICHD. The program randomly assigned families to a treatment group and provided wage, childcare, and health-insurance subsidies to those parents working at least 30 hours. The researchers are interviewing all mothers and children in the program to gauge whether children are still experiencing positive benefits 13 years later. A substudy of 44 families, who have been followed since their third year in the program, is providing researchers with an in-depth view of their experiences. Duncan has also co-written a book about the New Hope experience, Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children.

In the Illinois Families Study (IFS), human development and social policy professor Dan A. Lewis and colleagues studied former welfare recipients and the larger implications for welfare reform from 1999 to 2004. Lewis is currently working on a book manuscript that will summarize the study’s major findings. They include evidence of a great deal of “churning,” or movement in and out of different sectors of occupations and industries, low wages, and precarious situations for those who cannot find work.

A recent study, written by Lewis, research methodologist Spyros Konstantopoulos, and IPR graduate research assistant Lisa Altenbernd, focuses on the little-researched area of how recipients are actually earning a living through work under TANF. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, the researchers confirm that education, job skills, and health are important determinants of labor-market participation and performance. In addition, long-term welfare recipients are as likely to find and perform well in a job as short-term welfare recipients. They also find that government housing subsidies have a positive effect on finding and holding a job.

The aim of IFS is to inform policymakers on how Illinois families have been faring since the implementation of welfare reform. The study received funding from the Department of Education, NICHD, Administration for Children and Families, Chicago Community Trust, Joyce Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Polk Bros. Foundation.

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, assistant professor of sociology and African American studies, is completing a book manuscript, “The Situated Bureaucrat: Race, Class, and the Changing Terrain of Human Services.” In it, she explores how the professional and social identities of street-level bureaucrats shape how low-income families receive welfare services. Against the backdrop of increasing income inequality, work requirements for impoverished mothers, and a restructured social safety net, this study provides an in-depth look at the inner workings of a poverty relief agency. As welfare offices attempt to shift their organizational model from one of writing checks and monitoring fraud to an increasingly professionalized institution, caseworkers and others advance their own interpretations of how to transform their clients, the office, and their work. For these situated bureaucrats, the politics of professional roles and racial, class, and community interests give rise to distinct interpretations of what “helping the poor” looks like.

Child Welfare System
With a grant from the Searle Fund for Policy Research, Dorothy Roberts is completing research on the community-level effects of the disproportionate number of African American children in child welfare systems. She interviewed 27 black women in the predominantly black Chicago neighborhood of Woodlawn, which has high rates of foster-care placement. The residents were all aware of intense child welfare agency involvement in their neighborhood and identified profound effects on family and community relationships, including interference with parental authority, family conflicts over placement of children in foster care, damage to children’s ability to form social relationships, and distrust among neighbors. Yet most of the women did not believe that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was overly involved in their neighborhood—calling, in fact, for greater agency involvement to provide for families’ needs.

Roberts concludes that the residents of such neighborhoods must increasingly rely on child protection agencies for needed financial assistance because of the growing dearth of social programs in these neighborhoods. She explores the implications of these findings for a new research paradigm for addressing racial disproportionality and to understand the impact and role of child welfare agencies in African American neighborhoods.

Child Development
Labor economist Raquel Bernal is interested in the determinants of children’s cognitive ability. In particular, she is looking at how mothers’ employment and childcare decisions affect their children’s cognitive development. She finds that a child of a full-time working mother in childcare during the first five years of life can have as high as an 8.8 percent reduction in ability test scores. She also assesses the impact of policies on women’s decisions and children’s outcomes related to parental leave, childcare, and other incentives to stay at home after giving birth. This project received support from the Searle Fund for Policy Research.

With Michael Keane at Yale University, Bernal is developing an economic model to estimate the interplay between maternal employment, quality of child-care choices, and the child’s cognitive ability using a sample of single mothers in the United States. In their work, they exploit the variation in welfare rules across time and across states to identify the effects of interest. Some preliminary findings suggest that 3- to 6-year-olds of welfare-to-work mothers in informal daycare arrangements scored lower on cognitive tests compared with children in formal daycare environments or at home with their mothers.

Bernal has also raised her investigative scope to a macrolevel to consider how public policies on maternal and paternal leaves affect intrahousehold decision making, family structure, intergenerational mobility, and income distribution. She is working on this project with Anna Fruttero of New York University.

Educational Research and Policy
Many high school students and displaced workers have a poor understanding of the labor market and what it requires. They often enroll in programs that fail to help them to get the job they want. In the College-to-Careers project, James Rosenbaum, professor of human development and social policy, and his team are studying how employers get information about community college programs, how they decide whether these programs meet their needs, and whether employers influence curricula. He is also examining how employers view community colleges and which programs result in a higher potential for earnings. Rosenbaum’s research has also led him to explore how high schools prepare students for employment. The Spencer Foundation is supporting the project.

Attending college does not work out for all, he finds from systematic analyses of national data. He suggests that high schools must prepare students for life in the workforce whether or not they graduate from college, as high school success matters to employers. Schools should also create more concrete links to employers while students are still in high school, he suggests, and his research is analyzing experiments that use these school-to-work arrangements to improve the motivation of work-bound students.

Rosenbaum co-wrote the book After Admission: From College Access to College Success (Russell Sage Foundation Press) with Regina Deil-Amen of the University of Arizona and IPR graduate research assistant Ann Person. Community colleges have vastly expanded educational opportunity, particularly for disadvantaged students, and almost half of all college students attend these colleges. However, most students do not graduate or pick up better job opportunities. By comparing community colleges with private occupational colleges, they find occupational colleges help students to get better jobs because they have been taught more relevant skill sets. They also find that occupational colleges provide more support and guidance for students through structured academic plans and close monitoring by advisors. Using lessons learned from studying occupational colleges, the co-authors show community colleges how they can improve organizationally to increase their students’ job prospects. 

Using a national sample of 7,300 students, Rosenbaum and IPR graduate research assistant Jennifer Stephan find most poorly prepared students—those in the bottom quartile—were twice as likely to graduate if they attended a private school, with the most successful attending private, for-profit, two-year vocational schools. Further work with IPR graduate research assistant Lisbeth Goble uncovers some of the institutional influences that predict better graduation rates among those attending four-year colleges.

Teacher Quality
Michelle Reininger’s previous career as a high school chemistry teacher sparked her interest in teacher quality. Reininger, who is assistant professor of human development, social policy, and learning sciences, is working with the Chicago Public School system (CPS) on a longitudinal study of pre-service teachers, or those who are training to be teachers. She hopes to better understand the role of the student teaching experience in teacher preparation and supply. Reininger is starting by identifying the features and attributes of the various teacher preparation programs from which the majority of CPS teachers are drawn. She will then survey all CPS pre-service teachers before and after their student-teaching experiences to help define the teaching environment and its effect on preparing them to teach in a diverse urban environment. She will also track CPS pre-service teachers to determine who enters teaching and where, and subsequently if and when any leave teaching. To determine why individuals leave CPS, she will also survey those who do not go on to become teachers and those who exit early in their careers. Reininger hopes the results will provide much needed information about those activities that can attract talented teachers away from teaching as well as providing insight into what CPS and other urban districts can do to recruit and retain high-quality teachers. 

Reininger is also involved in the Teacher Pathways Project, a multiyear study of teacher preparation programs and pathways into teaching in New York City. This study of teachers and teacher preparation programs examines characteristics of teacher education and pathways into teaching and identifies attributes that have an impact on student outcomes in the city’s public schools.

School Readines and Pre-K Programs
When trying to establish early childhood interventions to spur later academic achievement, policymakers can opt for programs that emphasize various skills for school readiness. Economist Greg Duncan and IPR graduate research assistants Amy Claessens and Mimi Engel used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort to consider whether paying attention, anti-social behavior, or concrete reading and math skills were better indicators of kindergartners’ future academic success.

Despite much being written about the relative importance of socioemotional skills, they found that rudimentary math skills were the best predictors of 5th-grade performance in both math and reading. This was followed by early literacy skills for reading and attention skills for both math and reading. They recommend improving children’s pre-K attention abilities, in addition to targeting early math and reading skills, to improve kindergartners’ school performance.

Thomas D. Cook and IPR graduate research assistant Vivian Wong are conducting research on the quality of preschool programs. The number of state-run preschool programs has doubled since 1980 with more than one million children enrolled in programs in 38 states. Wong and Cook used data from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) to examine the effectiveness of programs in five states: Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. They found positive effects on children’s print awareness, early mathematics, and receptive vocabulary skills. But the results vary by state and outcome, and thus cannot be generalized across all state pre-K programs. In further research, they hope to unlock the reasons behind why some state programs generate larger cognitive impacts than others.

In another study, the two researchers looked at how state pre-K programs compare with Head Start. Using a recent NIEER study, some have argued that state programs have larger achievement effects on preschoolers than Head Start, based on a comparison of Westat’s first year Head Start results. But Cook and Wong cautioned that these evaluations are not similar. While the Head Start study uses a nationally representative sample, NIEER only looked at five of the most well-established state preschool programs—with four ranking higher than the national average. There were other differences as well, such as the Head Start children were poorer and the Head Start control group had more children in it who were in alternative preschools, thus creating a higher threshold for Head Start to reach in order to declare it effective. They found no solid evidence for the claim that state pre-K programs are better than Head Start programs at raising children’s achievement, and thus no scientifically valid basis for rolling federal monies into state block grants and away from the federally funded Head Start program.

Spatial Learning
An understanding of spatial relationships provides the foundation for a wide range of reasoning and communication skills as varied as designing buildings, solving mathematical problems, and forming mental abstractions. To this end, the National Science Foundation awarded a $3.5 million grant to a consortium of researchers from four universities, including Larry V. Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy, and three Northwestern colleagues, to establish the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC). SILC researchers will examine how to better understand spatial learning and develop related programs and technologies to transform educational practices for learners from preschool to college-age.

Distributed Leadership in Schools
James Spillane, Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change, is principal investigator of the Distributed Leadership Project, a longitudinal study of urban school leadership. Building on theories of distributed cognition, the central goal of the project is to make the “black box” of the practice of school leadership more transparent by analyzing how leaders think and act to improve mathematics, science, and literacy instruction in their schools.

His book Distributed Leadership (Jossey-Bass) shows how leadership happens in everyday school practices, through formal routines and informal interactions. He examines the distribution of leadership among administrators, specialists, teachers, and others, such as parents, in the school community. Spillane explains the ways in which leadership practice is stretched over leaders and followers through communications, routines, and tools such as memoranda, scheduling procedures, and evaluation protocols. The Searle Fund for Policy Research and Institute of Education Sciences have provided funding for parts of the study.

Spillane also finished a second recently released book, Distributed Leadership in Practice (Teachers College Press), that will crystallize what “distributed leadership” means for educational policymakers, practitioners, and researchers. Based on extensive research, the book will use case studies to illustrate how taking a distributed perspective can help researchers understand and connect more directly to leadership practice. It will also explore how a distributed perspective is different from other frameworks for thinking about leadership.

Spillane is principal investigator of the Distributed Leadership for Middle School Mathematics Education study, a four-year quantitative and qualitative study designed to develop and validate instruments for identifying and measuring leadership for mathematics in middle schools. The study seeks to fill in the holes of how content leadership affects how teachers teach and whether content leadership can be learned. By focusing on content leadership in urban schools, this work could contribute to improving mathematics education for historically underserved urban youth.

Neighborhood Effects
Do families that move out of high poverty neighborhoods to more affluent areas give their children a better shot at academic success? Economist Greg Duncan and his colleagues looked at test scores for 5,000 children, aged 6 to 20 in 2002, whose families had moved four to seven years prior in the Moving to Opportunity Program. They found that families did live in better neighborhoods and their children did go to slightly better schools. However, they did not find any evidence of improvements in reading and math scores, behavior or school problems, or school engagement, overall or for any age group. This was in opposition to earlier findings showing gains for younger children. They surmise that subsequent moves by the MTO families might have undone some of the benefits of the first move.

Skill Formation
Continuing his work on developing and implementing econometric models of skill formation has led economist Christopher Taber to investigate schooling, job training, and other forms of human capital investment. In a project on turnover and wage growth in the transition from school to work, Taber and Tricia Gladden of the Bureau of Labor Statistics offer preliminary findings that younger workers do not seem to behave optimally in the workforce. On average, over the first 10 years of their careers, they hold more than six jobs, are fired twice, and have quit their job at least once. While the rate of turnover tapers off as workers age, turnover can be positive for younger workers who quit to take higher paying jobs. But “quits to unemployment” can be costly, amounting to as much as $20,000, or 15 percent of earnings, over the first 10 years of a person’s work life.