Social disparities in children's vocabulary in early childhood. Does pre‐school education help to close the gap?1

Children start school with differing levels of skills. Thus, children of different social origin have different probabilities of educational success right from the start of their school career. This paper analyses how the gap in language abilities of children with different social backgrounds develops from age three to five. A focus lies on the question whether pre-school education can help to close this gap. The data of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) show that children's score on a standardized vocabulary test strongly depends on their parents' education. These social differences remain stable or even increase slightly over the two-year period. Using fixed effect models, it is demonstrated that children of higher educated parents can improve their vocabulary more strongly than children whose parents have a lower educational level. Participation in an early education institution positively affects the vocabulary development of children with lower educated parents while there is no significant pre-school effect for children of higher educated parents. The results indicate that pre-school attendance does not lead to a catching-up process of children with lower educated parents. But without pre-school attendance, the gap between children of higher and lower educated parents widens even further.     

Where Are the Children's Experiences? Analysing Social and Cultural Exclusion in 'Special' and 'Mainstream' Schools

In this paper we employ ethnographic data to illustrate that disabled children encounter discriminatory notions of 'normality' and 'difference' in both 'special' and 'mainstream' schools, and that these experiences relate to both the structural forces in schools, and the everyday individual and cultural practices of adults and children. In contrast to much of the literature in the field, this paper examines the everyday life experiences of adults and disabled children from their own perspective. We highlight disabled children's own criticisms of 'special' and 'mainstream' schools to illustrate the fluid nature of disabled children's lives within educational settings. We argue that schools will be prevented from becoming fully inclusive until adults who control schools take account of children's views of specific educational processes and until educational policy makers adopt a more nuanced multi-level approach to inclusion. Children should be enabled to challenge the structural, cultural and individual conditions which create disability.     

Consulting the Children: Interviews with Children Using Residential Respite Care Services

The Children Act, 1989, requires that services for children are provided in partnership with parents and that the wishes and feelings of the child and his/her parents are ascertained and given due consideration (sect. 22). As part of a research project assessing the quality of services to children with disabilities under the Children Act, the authors carried out evaluations of six residential respite care services. The services were used mainly by children with learning difficulties, some of whom had little or no speech. Staff at the schools attended by the children were asked to interview them, so that their views could be included in the evaluation reports. Interview schedules and aids to communication were devised to try and enable all the children to express their views. This article describes the initial schedules and the changes made in the light of experience during the research. The authors then summarise the children's responses and consider how the process of consultation could be improved in future.     

Examining the trajectories of children providing care for adults in rural Kenya: Implications for service delivery

Research on caregiving children tends to be limited to children's caregiving experiences of parents with a specific disease or disability. This has led to a common perception that children's caregiving is a single, uniform and often long-term experience. Whilst this is most certainly the case for many children in economically more advanced countries, this may not hold true in rural Africa, where poverty and AIDS can have significant knock-on effects on entire families and communities. This paper seeks to develop a more complex understanding of children's caring experiences by asking children whom they have cared for over time and explore the different pathways that lead to their caregiving at different stages of their lives. The study reports on qualitative data collected from 48 caregiving children and 10 adults in the Bondo district of western Kenya in 2007. A multi-method approach was adapted, with historical profiles, Photovoice and draw-and-write essays complementing 34 individual interviews and 2 group discussions. A thematic network analysis revealed that children's caregiving was not confined to a single experience. Children were observed to provide care for a number of different family and community members for varying periods of time and intensities. Although their living arrangements and life circumstances often gave them little choice but to care, a social recognition of children's capacity to provide care for fragile adults, helped the children construct an identity, which both children and adults drew on to rationalise children's continued and multiple caring experiences. The study concludes that agencies and community members looking to support caregiving children need to consider their care trajectories — including whom they care for as well as the order, intensity, location and duration of their past and likely future caring responsibilities.     

High Stakes: Time Poverty,Testing, and the Children of the Working Poor

Sociological interest in the implementation of policy generally focuses on the ways a single stream of policy creates a set of measurable consequences either for parents or children. This article takes an ethnographic approach to the study of conflicting policy mandates that collide in the lives of families moving from welfare to work at the same time that schools are implementing high stakes tests and the end of social promotion. We show that these two policies make contradictory demands on parents, to the potential detriment of children. Ethnographic research reveals the ways in which multiple and incompatible forms of policy impact poor families, putting them in the unhappy position of choosing between economic stability or mobility and children's educational performance.     

Parental attitudes towards education: What matters for children's well-being?

This study explores the potential influence of parental attitudes towards education on their children's daily life and their development in Korea. Qualitative methodologies were used; semi-structured in-depth interviews with 34 participants. The findings suggest that the desire of the parents for the educational success of their children is profound and it has a huge impact on their actual behavior towards their children. Although there was a contrast between what parents should want and the underlying preoccupying concern, all of the parents placed great importance on their children's academic achievement as a means to acquire personal advancement, higher social status, and wealth. The children's developmental needs for leisure, pleasure, and sleeping are overlooked. Their psychological and emotional well-being tends to be ignored. Focusing on the best interests of children is going too far for some in Korean society. This study concludes that behind the idea of well-being of children and fulfilling each child's potential must lie fundamental values concerning the needs, interests and welfare of children. This must be put at the heart of our policies and practices.     

Home-school-community connection: elementary school leaders' solutions for improvement

The author of this original case study research investigates advocacy barriers impeding the home, school, and community connection. Specific solutions by educational professions regarding how to bridge these three arenas are provided in this study. Twenty educators serving in varying teaching roles from two high needs elementary schools located in the greater western New York region, participated by answering a quantitative and qualitative confidential survey. Survey results indicate that a more unified home, school, and community connection is beneficial to include families, educators, and community service providers. Findings support that to advance ecological sensitivity and advocacy for school children at risk, educators should consult more with administration such as building principals and vice principals, collaborate more with outreach community social service providers, and communicate more with children's parents and/or caregivers.     

Social Work in Rural New South Wales School Settings: Addressing Inequalities Beyond the School Gate

Children and young people in rural Australia experience disadvantage compared with metropolitan counterparts, with low educational attainment and disengagement from schooling being linked to poorer health outcomes. Schools are an existing contact point between individuals and health services. However, these health services are often overburdened and have limited scope to address broader social issues and teaching staff are focused on achieving curriculum outcomes. Embedding social workers within schools may provide an avenue for supporting students, yet social workers are rarely present in New South Wales public schools. This paper describes a study to determine teachers’ understanding of the socioeconomic issues faced by school students, and the role of the social work profession in addressing such issues as part of the early stages of establishing a Social Work in Schools (SWiS) project. Eighteen semistructured interviews were undertaken with teachers across four rural Australian schools. Participants identified their awareness of potential risk factors that could lead to educational disengagement, reflected on their own limitations in dealing with these broader health presentations given their teaching focus, and provided insights into their understanding of the potential role of social workers.     

“We Don't Know How to Do This”: Rural Parents' Perspectives on and Roles in Enrollment at a Private,Selective Liberal Arts College

Rural youth trail their non-rural counterparts in college enrollment and attainment, especially for degrees from selective schools; these gaps further spatial inequality in the United States. Much research has focused on rural parents as impediments to rural college-going: many rural parents did not attend college, and their educational aspirations for their children are lower than those of urban parents. However, every year, thousands of rural students do head to college, even to selective schools, and little is known about their parents' influence on their enrollment. This qualitative study focuses on rural parents without a bachelors degree, investigating the roles they play in their children's aspirations and enrollment at a private, selective liberal arts college and examining their perspectives on this type of school. The results suggest that parents are an important source of social capital, supporting aspirations and enrollment. They also show that these parents see a liberal arts education as a path to a remunerative and rewarding career, and, in supporting their children's college choice, they value factors—financial aid, proximity, and a welcoming school culture—that mitigate the social, cultural, and moral boundaries separating home from college.     

RACE AND THE EDUCATIONAL EXPECTATIONS OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN: The Case of South Africa

South Africa, a country that is highly stratified by race, is an important location for studying the relationship between race and educational expectations. Using a longitudinal data set, we examine the educational expectations of black (African), colored (mixed race), and white (European ancestry) parents and children in Cape Town, South Africa. We find that parents and children have high educational expectations regardless of race, but black parents and children have higher educational expectations than coloreds and whites once socioeconomic and other factors are controlled. We also find that parents' and children's expectations tend to agree more and are more closely correlated among coloreds and whites than blacks. We test two explanations for the educational expectations of parents and children, finding more support for the status attainment perspective among coloreds and whites than blacks and support for the family social capital perspective among blacks and coloreds only.     

The potential for successful family foster care: conceptualizing competency domains for foster parents

The potential to foster successfully starts with developing and supporting competency in 12 domains: providing a safe and secure environment, providing a nurturing environment, promoting educational attainment and success, meeting physical and mental healthcare needs, promoting social and emotional development, supporting diversity and children's cultural needs, supporting permanency planning, managing ambiguity and loss for the foster child and family, growing as a foster parent, managing the demands of fostering on personal and familial well-being, supporting relationships between children and their families, and working as a team member. This article describes each domain and reviews relevant research to help guide the assessment of practicing and future foster parents.     

Trauma of children of the Sudan: a constructivist exploration

This article examines the trauma of Sudanese refugee children living in a Midwestern city from a social constructivist view. From a qualitative perspective, the study explored how the Sudanese children, their U.S. foster parents, and social workers from an American child welfare agency described their understanding of the migration experience. Results point to the importance of placing the children's trauma in the context of their own cultures, as child welfare workers assist in the children's adjustment to the United States.     

Institutional Change and Coproduction of Public Services: The Effect of Charter Schools on Parental Involvement

Recent discussions of school choice have revived arguments thatthe decentralization of governing institutions can enhance thequality of public services by increasing the participation ofintended beneficiaries in the production of those services.We use data from the Schools and Staffing Survey to examinethe extent to which the decentralization of authority to charterschools induces parents to become more involved in their children'sschools. We find that parents are indeed more involved in charterschools than in observationally similar public schools, especiallyin urban elementary and middle schools. Although we find thatthis difference is partly attributable to measurable institutionaland organizational factors, we also find that charter schoolstend to be established in areas with above-average proportionsof involved parents, and we find suggestive evidence that, withinthose areas, it is the more involved parents who tend to selectinto charter schools. Thus, while the institutional characteristicsof charter schools do appear to induce parents to become moreinvolved in their children's schools, such characteristics areonly part of the explanation for the greater parental involvementin charter schools than in traditional public schools.     

Coleman Advocates for Children And Youth: a pioneering child advocacy organization (1974-2008)

Coleman Advocates for Youth and Children is a pioneering 30-year-old child advocacy organization founded by several affluent community members and children's service professionals to stop housing abused and neglected children in juvenile hall. Today, low-income youth and parents in families of color are now assuming leadership in developing a unique hybrid approach that integrates community organizing with more traditional child advocacy strategies and focuses on increasing affordable housing and improving the city's educational system. The strategies employed by Coleman have also evolved, shifting from insider advocacy with administrative officials to public campaigns targeting the city budget process, to local initiative campaigns, and most recently to electoral politics. This organizational history features the issues mission and structure, leadership, managing issues, advocacy strategies and community relations, and funding.     

青少年生命认知的影响因素初探

有关青少年生命认识的影响因素的研究在中国尚处于薄弱地位。通过对中小学生的生命认知及相关因素的实证研究发现：个体经历不同,在死亡认知上的表现差异显著,经历过人的死亡的青少年有更多表达了对死亡本质的认知,较少表达对死亡的具体形象认知;父母的应对方式不同．导致青少年对于死亡认知的表达有显著差异。日常生活中对死亡事件是否讨论,会影响到青少年对生命以及死亡的认知。生命认知方面,有过讨论经验的青少年有更多对生命表达态度的认知;死亡认知方面,有过讨论经验的青少年有更多对死亡本质和表达态度的认知。     

Social Closure and Educational Attainment

This article examines how network closure among parents affects adolescents’ educational attainment. First, we introduce a distinction between informal closure and school‐based closure. Second, we investigate whether and how the effect of informal and school‐based parental network closure varies across social contexts. Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and multilevel models show that parental network closure modestly impacts educational outcomes. Moreover, educational benefits of informal closure in parent networks are contingent on social context. Closure only benefits educational attainment in low‐poverty schools. In high‐poverty schools, informal closure in parent networks lowers educational attainment. The social closure generated in informal connections among parents thereby contributes to the encapsulation of disadvantage in areas of concentrated poverty, which is not the case for school‐based closure.     

Developing inclusive educational practices for refugee children in the Czech Republic

All children in the Czech Republic have the legal right to primary education, regardless of nationality and legal status. This article is based on a study of refugee children and their educational situation. The study reveals that refugee students in the Czech Republic are not benefiting fully from this fundamental right and that their educational future is in jeopardy. The study identified six major barriers to full participation and educational benefits. Finally, a plan of action to overcome barriers is put forward. Key ingredients are effective information transfer among state agencies, non‐governmental organizations, parents, children and schools.     

To What Extent Can the School Reduce the Gaps Between Children Raised by Divorced and Intact Families

This study deals with the extent and conditions under which the school can compensate children for the deficit in parental investment due to the divorce of their parents. Pair matched samples of one- and two-parent children from seven elementary schools, located near Tel Aviv, Israel, are compared. Children raised by divorced mothers in regular schools turned out to have lower scholastic achievements as well as lower popularity (among peers) than children raised in intact families. However when the same comparison was carried out in an experimental school having an extended school day and student participation, most of these differences dissapeared. Some implications of these findings for educational policy are discussed.     

Bildungserfolg von Kindern in Abhängigkeit von der Stellung in der Geschwisterreihe

Based on grades in school and on parental educational aspirations the article investigates the influence of siblings’ birth order on educational opportunities and educational success of elementary school pupils. It is examined whether this influence varies by social strata, i.e., whether it is moderated by the socio-economic status of parental households. Theoretical background are the resource dilution model which focuses on siblings’ rivalry for scarce family resources, the confluence model which refers to the intellectual environment within families, and the family niche model which postulates effects of siblings on personality traits of children. Furthermore, status maintenance motives of parents are used to explain birth order effects. Empirical analyses are based on a study of 1369 pupils—4th graders of elementary schools—in the city of Wiesbaden, Germany. It can be shown that the birth order has negative effects on the chosen educational indicators (grades in school, parental educational aspirations). In accordance with prior research, grades of children get worse with their position in the birth order, other things being equal. The birth order also affects educational aspirations which parents hold for their children. In this context, the crucial result of the article is: When older siblings already guarantee the social status of the family in an intergenerational perspective, parents with high SES reduce their educational aspirations for younger siblings (elimination of the status maintenance motive). In families with low SES, however, parental educational aspirations for younger siblings increase, when older siblings successfully have reached higher educational credentials (social learning from role models).     

School-Choice Stories: The Role of Culture

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith.