In this article, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan argue that “disciplinary literacy” — advanced literacy instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, and social studies — should be a focus of middle and secondary school settings. Moving beyond the oft-cited “every teacher a teacher of reading” philosophy that has historically frustrated secondary content-area teachers, the Shanahans present data collected during the first two years of a study on disciplinary literacy that reveal how content experts and secondary content teachers read disciplinary texts, make use of comprehension strategies, and subsequently teach those strategies to adolescent readers. Preliminary findings suggest that experts from math, chemistry, and history read their respective texts quite differently; consequently, both the content-area experts and secondary teachers in this study recommend different comprehension strategies for work with adolescents. This study not only has implications for which comprehension strategies might best fit particular disciplinary reading tasks, but also suggests how students may be best prepared for the reading, writing, and thinking required by advanced disciplinary coursework. Reading is commonly viewed as a basic set of skills, widely adaptable and applicable to all kinds of texts and reading situations. Accordingly, in the 1990s, most states took on the challenge of improving young children’s reading skills, assuming that once the basics of literacy were accomplished, students would be well equipped for literacy-related tasks later in life (Blair, 1999). The idea that basic reading skills automatically evolve into more advanced reading skills, and that these basic skills are highly generalizable and adaptable, is partially correct: The basic perceptual and decoding skills that are connected with early

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Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content- Area Literacy

Part V. The Underlying Framework: 13. A minimal theory of social transfers 14. A guide to the tests Part VI. Accounting for Social Spending, Jobs and Growth: 15. Explaining the rise of mass public schooling 16. Explaining the rise of social transfers 17. What drove postwar social spending? 18. Social transfers hardly affected growth 19. Reconciling unemployment and growth in the OECD Appendices.

Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century

This paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s. A brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes. The paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes, labor force changes, poverty and income changes, and family formation changes. A growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well-being. One particular set of "new-style" welfare programs seems to show especially promising results, with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty.

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Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States

This pioneering volume casts a stark light on the ways rising inequality may now be compromising schools’ functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America.

Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances

In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the cyclical sensitivity during the Great Recession to that in the early 1980s recession. We present raw tabulations and estimate a state panel data model that leverages variation across U.S. states in the timing and severity of business cycles. We find that the impacts of the Great Recession are not uniform across demographic groups and have been felt most strongly for men, black and Hispanic workers, youth, and low-education workers. These dramatic differences in the cyclicality across demographic groups are remarkably stable across three decades of time and throughout recessionary periods and expansionary periods. For the 2007 recession, these differences are largely explained by differences in exposure to cycles across industry-occupation employment.

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Who Suffers during Recessions

Conventional wisdom holds that women on welfare will be better off in the long run if they take a job, even if it means initially having less money to spend on their and their children's needs. Underlying this thinking is the belief that women who take low-paying jobs will eventually move up to higher paying jobs either with their current employer or by changing employers. This paper examines the employment transitions of young women focusing on the likelihood that women who turn to the welfare system for support will make the transition from low-paying to high-paying jobs. The data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Based on the experiences of women who never received welfare, an estimated one-quarter of young women who received welfare could be firmly established in jobs paying more than $9.50 an hour by ages 26 and 27. An additional 40 percent would work steadily but in low-paying jobs, and more than one-third would work only sporadically. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Moving Up, Moving Out, or Going Nowhere? A Study of the Employment Patterns of Young Women and the Implications for Welfare Mothers

Acs and Loprest pull together information from a host of leaver studies to provide a bottom line assessment of what was learned. They compare welfare leaver outcomes across geographic areas and the nation as a whole. This effort allows them to paint a comprehensive picture of the employment, income, and hardships families experience after leaving welfare.

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Leaving Welfare: Employment And Well-being Of Families That Left Welfare In The Post-Entitlement Era

The impact of welfare on fertility in the United States is explored focusing on the theory that some women have many children to increase their incomes and to prolong their stay on welfare rolls. The author "examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child using data on young mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). I find that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular. Furthermore mothers who received welfare to support their first children are no more likely to have additional children in any given year through the age of 23." (EXCERPT)

The impact of welfare on young mothers subsequent childbearing decisions.

This analysis finds that working 20 hours per week at minimum wage increases income by an average of 50 percent over cash assistance in the 12 states studied. Public Policy contributes much to making work pay. The interaction of programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and state decisions on cash benefits, earnings disregards, Food Stamps, access to child care, and health insurance create powerful economic incentives to work.

Does Work Pay? An Analysis of the Work Incentives under TANF

Data from three recent surveys indicate that about 40 percent of workers with employment-based health insurance are enrolled in plans that their employers self-insure. Despite the conside...

Gregory Acs

Papers

Moving Up, Moving Out, or Going Nowhere? A Study of the Employment Patterns of Young Women and the Implications for Welfare Mothers

Leaving Welfare: Employment And Well-being Of Families That Left Welfare In The Post-Entitlement Era

The impact of welfare on young mothers subsequent childbearing decisions.

Does Work Pay? An Analysis of the Work Incentives under TANF

Self-Insured Employer Health Plans: Prevalence, Profile, Provisions, and Premiums