Ebook: Early Care and Education for Children in Poverty : Promises, Programs, and Long-Term Results

Establishes the power of early care and education to change children's lives, particularly children in poverty.Barnett and Boocock present a multi-disciplinary assessment of the long-term outcomes of early care and education in the United States and abroad. Innovative new research, together with up-to-date, comprehensive reviews, provide lessons for the design of early childhood programs, policies, and research. Contributors from the fields of education, psychology, sociology, and economics address questions about the causal relationships through which early childhood programs produce their long-term effects, the characteristics of effective early childhood programs, how nations respond to the global social and economic trends that are changing the lives of children and their families everywhere, child care's effects on maternal labor force participation, the potential and perils of welfare reform, and the implications of national economic and political structures for early care and education policies. A unique feature of the book is its attention to the practical problems of conducting research to support public policy development, translating research results into public policy, and improving communication between researchers and policy makers. The research presented in this important volume clearly establishes that early care and education can permanently improve the lives of children in poverty, provides research-based recommendations for achieving that goal through public policy, and sets an agenda for future research on early care and education's long-term outcomes.At Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education, W. Steven Barnett is Professor of Economics and Policy. Barnett has written and collaborated on several books, including Lives in the Balance: Age-27 Benefit-Cost Analysis of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program. Sarane Spence Boocock is Professor of Sociology. Boocock has published many other works, including An Introduction to the Sociology of Learning and Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family.