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Largely overlooked in the empirical literature on gentrification is the potential impact that school closures play in this process. This study examines whether the weakening of the neighborhood-school connection brought about by school closures affects the likelihood that nearby neighborhoods experience gentrification. Integrating longitudinal data from the U.S. Census with data on every urban school closure that occurred nationwide between 2000 and 2012, this study finds that college-educated White households were far more likely to gentrify Black neighborhoods following the closure of a local school. In particular, school closures increased the likelihood that the most racially segregated Black neighborhoods gentrified by 9 percentage points, a process that corresponded during this period to an average loss in these neighborhoods of roughly 200 Black residents. Results suggest that school closures do not simply alter the educational landscape, school closures are also emblematic of a larger spatial and racial reimagining of U.S. cities that dispossess and displaces communities of color.

Previous research has shown that investments during the early childhood period are likely to have the highest social return. We use administrative data from Virginia to document participation in SNAP and TANF among children born between 2007-2010 during their early childhood period, which we define here as birth to age six. We find that participation in SNAP is about four times greater than participation in TANF and that most children begin their connection with the social welfare system in their birth year. Children who participate earlier in life tend to stay connected over a longer portion of the early childhood period, although SNAP participation peaks around ages 3-4 while TANF peaks earlier, around ages 2-3. In terms of joint participation, most households on SNAP do not receive TANF and about 1 in 12 children on TANF do not receive SNAP. Finally, over the early childhood period, on average, just under 1 in 2 children in Virginia participated in SNAP or TANF but demography plays an important role in this process: The level of cumulative receipt is 1 in 4 among White children, 1 in 2 among Hispanic children but rises to 3 in 4 for Black children; cumulative receipt is also higher in nonmetropolitan counties than metropolitan counties. This study documents the reach of the existing social welfare system during the early childhood period, underlining the importance of race and space in 21st century America.

One in six newborns were born poor over the past 40 years, and nearly half remained poor half their childhoods. These persistently poor children are nearly 90 percent more likely than never-poor children to enter their 20s without completing high school and are four times more likely to give birth outside of marriage during their teenage years. Children whose parents did not complete high school are less likely to complete high school themselves. This paper examines the magnitude of child poverty, family characteristics related to childhood poverty persistence, and childhood poverty's lasting consequences. An appendix presents data and sample. (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures, and 26 notes.)

Time regulates the lives of educators. Time on task, 45-minute classes, 2-hour literacy blocks, 10-week marking periods, and 40-week school years are central to teachers' lives and to the operation of schools. In contemporary schools, benchmarks, standards, promotion, retention, graduation, and ultimately school success are all intricately connected to time. Recently, politicians, policy makers, and educators have increasingly focused on what students should be able to do at certain points in time. Passing standardized tests, achieving grade-level standards, and attaining text-level benchmarks all involve temporal expectations. Time plays a significant role in the culture of schools and in the ways students and staff experience schools (Ben-Peretz & Bromme, 1990). As Zerubavel (1981) argued, "time seems to constitute one of the major parameters of the context on which the meaning of social acts and situations depends" (pp. 101-102). However, recent analyses have focused on time as a resource and have neglected the sociological and semiotic meanings that accompany time. Unlike earlier discussions of time, this paper makes a case for recognizing "time as context"--as a constitutive dimension of experience that informs the ways students make sense of literacy, schooling, and themselves. Time is important because long-term processes--such as literacy learning, identity construction, and school trajectories--all involve longitudinal meaning construction. As Bloome, Beierle, Grigorenko, and Goldman (2009) explained, "people take hold of time, they structure, organize, and represent it, give it meaning and social significance, and experience it both individually and collectively in terms of those meanings and social significances" (pp. 314-315). In this paper, the author uses a case study approach to explore various aspects of time as it relates to the specific learning trajectory and affordances of one low-income, African American student, Jermaine Hudson. The author argues that time is a dimension of the contexts in which Jermaine made sense of his world and himself. (Contains 6 tables and 5 figures.)

Objectives: We aim to understand why blacks are significantly less likely than whites to perpetuate their middle class status across generations. To do so, we focus on the potentially different associations between parental job loss and youth's educational attainment in black and white middle class families. Methods: We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), following those children "born" into the survey between 1968 and 1979 and followed through age 21. We conduct multivariate regression analyses to test the association between parental job loss during childhood and youth's educational attainment by age 21. Results: We find that parental job loss is associated with a lesser likelihood of obtaining any post-secondary education for all offspring, but that the association for blacks is almost three times as strong. A substantial share of the differential impact of job loss on black and white middle class youth is explained by race differences in household wealth, long-run measures of family income, and, especially, parental experience of long-term unemployment. Conclusions: These findings highlight the fragile economic foundation of the black middle-class and suggest that intergenerational persistence of class status in this population may be highly dependent on the avoidance of common economic shocks. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 11 footnotes.) [Additional funding for this paper was provided by a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholars Award.]

Educators must consider how learning environments can structure experiences to produce desired learning outcomes. In this paper, the author describes one type of learning environment where youth have the opportunity to construct adaptive, emergent identities--a "dramaturgical" process that structures the telling, adapting, and performing of personal narratives (Halverson, 2007, 2008; Wiley & Feiner, 2001). Using her own research on the dramaturgical process over the past 7 years, as well as other empirical studies documenting this type of work, the author argues that the dramaturgical process is a powerful learning environment for understanding positive youth development. She begins by reviewing the literature on the positive youth development movement in youth-based organizations, and specifically the role "identity" plays as a construct in this movement. She then describes how the practices of arts-based youth organizations can be analyzed in terms of four key elements of positive youth development models: (1) Positive development in art making involves a "dramaturgical process"--the telling, adapting, and performing of narratives of personal experience; (2) Participating in the dramaturgical process facilitates youth in "exploring possible selves"; (3) Participating youth often engage in "detypification", a mechanism for affiliating with a traditionally stigmatized identity in a positive way; and (4) Participating in the dramaturgical process can support both individualistic and collectivistic conceptions of identity. The choice of orientation shapes the way youth work to create autobiographical art. The author concludes by discussing why making art, particularly autobiographical art, provides a viable learning environment for the positive development of adolescents. (Contains 1 footnote.) [Funding for this report was provided by the MacArthur Foundation.]

In this paper we offer new evidence on earnings and income volatility in the United States over the past four decades by using matched data from the March Current Population Survey. We find that between 1973 and 2008 family income volatility rose by 38 percent, primarily as a result of higher volatility of husbands earnings and non means-tested nonlabor income. Rising family income volatility is in evidence across race, education, and family structure, and after declining sharply while young, it is increasing in the latter part of the life cycle among the skilled. The Federal tax and transfer system dampens the magnitude of volatility in any given year, but not the trends. Nonparametric tests of structural change indicate that overall family income volatility peaked in 1999, with the 2000s characterized by greater short-term volatility rather than a continued secular increase. Most of the increase in family earnings volatility occurred prior to the 1990s, which coincides with the trend volatility of male earnings. The earnings volatility of women fell dramatically through the early 1980s, and the ongoing secular decline implies male and female earnings volatility is converging. A variance decomposition suggests that the trends in earning volatility are driven both by increases in the conditional variance of earnings of continuous workers as well as the variance of the conditional mean of those workers exiting the labor force. Data Appendix is included. (Contains 6 tables, 20 figures, and 5 footnotes.)

The Education-Drug Use Connection focused primarily on a nationwide sample of adolescents, first surveyed when they were nearing the end of 8th grade in the years 1991, 1992, and 1993, and followed biennially for eight years thereafter. (Full details on samples and methods are provided in Bachman et al., 2008, and are not repeated here.) The analyses in that book were based on the total samples of males and females, analyzed separately because of important gender differences in educational experiences, delinquency, and substance use. Most of the analyses included a race/ethnicity dimension (distinguishing between Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and a remaining category that combined all others); it was a background dimension and statistically controlled any additive effects of race/ethnicity on the relationships between educational factors and various dimensions of substance use. Important subgroup differences were evident in the analyses, and were often noted--albeit briefly. Statistically controlling additive effects does not, however, fully guard against spuriously attributing racial/ethnic differences to other effects. As a further check against that risk, we repeated key analyses with only the White respondents included, and satisfied ourselves that racial/ethnic differences did not produce erroneous results in our findings for the total samples of males and females. We did not, however, attempt to explore interactions involving race/ethnicity. That remaining task, examining whether the same patterns of relationships found for the total samples are evident in each of the subgroups, is the main focus of the present paper. (Contains 1 footnote, 8 figures, and 12 tables.) [For "Monitoring the Future Occasional Paper Paper 65," see ED508288.]

This study examines how familial contexts affect poverty disparities between the children of immigrant and US-born Blacks, and among Black and non-Black children of immigrants. Despite lower gross child poverty rates in immigrant than US-born Black families, accounting for differences in family structure reveals that child poverty risks among Blacks are highest in single-parent Black immigrant families. In addition, within two-parent immigrant families, child poverty declines associated with increasing assimilation are greater than the respective declines in single-parent families. The heads of Black immigrant households have more schooling than those of native-Black households. However, increased schooling has a weaker negative association with child poverty among the former than the latter. In terms of racial disparities among the children of immigrants, poverty rates are higher among Black than non-Black children. This Black disadvantage is, however, driven by the outcomes of first-generation children of African and Hispanic-Black immigrants. The results also show that although children in refugee families face elevated poverty risks, these risks are higher among Black than non-Black children of refugees. In addition, the poverty-reducing impact associated with having an English-proficient household-head is about three times lower among Black than non-Hispanic White children of immigrants. (Contains 7 footnotes, 7 tables and 2 figures.)

The landmark Civic Mission of Schools report of 2003 laid out an argument for the role of schools in promoting youth civic engagement and presented a range of promising ideas and practices to accomplish that. In this study we describe the civic engagement outcomes that Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Louisville, KY, has chosen to promote in its students. The outcomes constitute a vision of civic engagement that sees youth as well-rounded citizens capable of engaging in civil, political, and problem-solving activities, both individually and socially. In 2007, JCPS revised its annual survey of students to include the above-mentioned civic outcomes and other new measures as part of a whole-child approach to monitoring educational development. Data collected from high school students by this survey in 2008 and 2009 were used to identify and characterize a number of factors which, theory and empirical research suggest, may be important predictors of youth civic engagement. The results show that most of the factors in our models of civic engagement were positively related to youth civic engagement. Using these findings and theoretical considerations, we sorted factors into three levels of importance. Overall, the most important predictors of youth civic engagement in our models were "community service", "political discussion", and "environmental conservation". At an intermediate level of importance were "nonsport extracurricular activities", "conflict resolution skill", and "positive character", as well as "personal efficacy", "willingness to contact public officials about issues of concern", and "intention to vote". Seven other factors were also found to have positive, but somewhat weaker or less-widespread associations with youth civic engagement. Using a large sample in an urban school district, this study reinforces claims that community service, discussion of politics, and nonsport extracurricular activities boost civic engagement. These are three of the "promising practices" recommended for schools in the Civic Mission of Schools report, and this study reinforces the importance of providing them. The findings also provide intriguing evidence of the potential value of environmental conservation, conflict resolution skill, and character education as pathways to civic engagement. (Contains 11 tables.)

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor conjectured that in 25 years affirmative action in college admissions will be unnecessary. We project the test score distribution of black and white college applicants 25 years from now, focusing on the role of black-white family income gaps. Economic progress alone is unlikely to narrow the achievement gap enough in 25 years to produce today's racial diversity levels with race-blind admissions. A return to the rapid black-white test score convergence of the 1980s could plausibly cause black representation to approach current levels at moderately selective schools, but not at the most selective schools. (Contains 7 figures, 3 tables, and 16 notes.)

Giving Back to the Community: African American Inner City Teens and Civic Engagement was an exercise in ethnographic research. Intentionally different from the more common quantitative studies conducted on civic engagement, this qualitative data gathering project was intended to focus solely on the patterns of civic engagement habits of low income inner city African American youth to better assess the likely causes of civic engagement trends. My research, however, resulted in the uncovering of a much broader story about African American inner city community traditions, networks, and norms. In the end, the research attempts to define this community's version of "civic engagement", and its relationship to mainstream civic institutions and civic life. [This report was produced by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland, and Charles Communications Consulting.]

Researchers have theorized that programs to promote positive citizenship should begin with an opportunity for adolescents to participate in civic activities, such as community service or political volunteering. In this report, the authors expand this theoretical perspective by arguing that programs to promote positive citizenship may need to begin by focusing on: social interactions in youths' lives, such as interactions with parents and peers and on the culture in which youth are raised. The authors hypothesize that these informal interactions socialize or "prime" youth to have the motivation and values that subsequently lead to positive citizenship behaviors. To examine their hypothesis, the authors collected data during a period judged to be one which afforded an opportunity to participate in a positive citizenship activity salient to a large percentage of the sample population. The authors conclude that their findings contribute to the field of youth civic engagement by providing more concrete evidence for the unique effects that informal social interactions have on youth, above and beyond previous citizenship engagement, religiosity, parental education, ethnicity and gender. Additionally, the authors conclude that early adolescents who have altruistic values and a motivation to better society are more likely to engage in citizenship activities later in adolescence. More specifically for African American youth, ethnic-related experiences and attitudes that are salient or matter to the youths' self-concepts appear to be important predictors of later citizenship engagement. From this finding, the authors theorize the key component of ethnic socialization to be the salience of the socialization and the subsequent citizenship activity to the youth's self-concept. The results are discussed with regard to program and policy development as well as future research directions. (Contains 1 figure and 6 tables.) [This report was produced by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).]

The authors examine racial and ethnic differences in computer ownership and Internet usage using data from a survey conducted by the Nomura Research Institute in 2000. They focus on on-line shopping because few studies have examined racial and ethnic differences in e-commerce. The results indicate that blacks and Hispanics are less likely to own or use a computer than are non-Hispanic whites but are not less likely to shop on-line. Indeed, blacks appear to shop on-line more frequently and to spend more than non-Hispanic whites do. (Determinants of Computer Ownership and Usage in August 2000 CPS; and Descriptive Statistics for Socioeconomic Characteristics in Nomura Data Set are appended. Contains 2 footnotes and 6 tables.)

Proponents of school choice argue that schools of choice build stronger parent communities. Using data from the National Household Education Surveys Program, a nationally-representitive cross-section of U.S. households, I examine the empirical evidence for this claim. To account for the difficulties in identifying causal effects in cross-sectional observational data, I estimate a model that includes the parent's unobserved propensity to both participate in school activities and to choose a public or private school other than their geographically assigned public school. (Contains 3 tables and 5 footnotes.)