Marcia K. Meyers

Inequality in Preschool Education and School Readiness

Attendance in U.S. preschools has risen substantially in recent decades, but gaps in enrollment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families remain. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999, we analyze the effect of participation in child care and early education on children’s school readiness as measured by early reading and math skills in kindergarten and first grade. We find that children who attended a center or school-based preschool program in the year before school entry perform better on assessments of reading and math skills upon beginning kindergarten, after controlling for a host of family background and other factors that might be associated with selection into early education programs and relatively high academic skills. This advantage persists when children’s skills are measured in the spring of kindergarten and first grade, and children who attended early education programs are also less likely to be retained in kindergarten. In most instances, the effects are largest for disadvantaged groups, raising the possibility that policies promoting preschool enrollment of children from disadvantaged families might help to narrow the school readiness gap.

On the front lines of welfare delivery: Are workers implementing policy reforms?

The impact of policy changes on the local delivery of services has been overlooked in several decades of largely unsuccessful efforts to “reform” welfare. This article uses one case of state-level welfare reform in the early 1990s to examine the implementation of policy changes in local welfare offices. Direct observation of transactions between welfare workers and clients suggests that policy reforms were not fully implemented by street-level bureaucrats. The instrumental transactions that continued to dominate interactions with clients were consistent with processing claims and rationing scarce resources, but they were poorly aligned with new policies aimed at changing the services and message delivered to welfare clients. The failure to fully implement reforms on the frontlines has implications for the achievement of policy objectives and for equity in service provision. Implementation issues will have even greater urgency as welfare is devolved from federal to state governments.

Child care subsidies and the employment of welfare recipients

Changing patterns of maternal employment, coupled with stronger work requirements for welfare recipients, are increasing the demand for child care. For many families, the cost of child care creates a financial burden; for mothers with low incomes and those who are former welfare recipients, these costs may be an insurmountable barrier to employment or economic self-sufficiency. Despite increased public spending in this area, the receipt of any child care subsidy appears to be a relatively rare and uncertain event. In this study, we use data from a sample of low-income single mothers (current and recent welfare recipients in California) to estimate the probability of their receiving child care subsidies and the effect of this probability on labor market activity.

Creating Gender Egalitarian Societies: An Agenda for Reform

In this article, we describe the social and economic changes that have contributed to contemporary problems of work—family conflict, gender inequality, and risks to childrens healthy development. We draw on feminist welfare state scholarship to outline an institutional arrangement that would support an earner—carer society—a social arrangement in which women and men engage symmetrically in paid work and unpaid caregiving and where young children have ample time with their parents. We present a blueprint for work—family reconciliation policies in three areas—paid family-leave provisions, working-time regulations, and early childhood education and care—and we identify key policy design principles. We describe and assess these work—family reconciliation policies as they operate in six European countries widely considered to be policy exemplars: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and France. We close with an analysis of potential objections to these policies.

Choice and Accommodation in Parental Child Care Decisions

As women approach parity with men in their representation in the U.S. labor force, child care has become a critical concern both for families and for community development professionals. In this paper, we review recent literature on parental child care decisions and on socio-economic differences in child care utilization. We contrast two bodies of theoretical and empirical research on the determinants of child care arrangements, comparing models of individual consumption choice with models of socially constructed or situated patterns of action. This research suggests that parental child care decisions may be best understood as accommodations—to family and employment demands, social and cultural expectations, available information, and financial, social, and other resources—that often reproduce other forms of economic and social stratification.

The Cost of Caring: Childhood Disability and Poor Families

Children in poor families are at heightened risk for disabilities and chronic health problems, and care for these children can impose substantial costs on families and public programs. Although the prevalence and costs of disabilities among poor children have important policy implications, they have been largely overlooked in research on poverty and welfare and on the costs of childhood disabilities. This article analyzes the prevalence of childhood disabilities and chronic illness among welfare recipient families in California and the probability families caring for these children experience higher out‐of‐pocket costs and material hardship than do other similar families.

Organizational Factors in the Integration of Services for Children

Service coordination is a recurring, but elusive, goal for the multiple social and health systems that provide services for children. One key to understanding the failure to integrate services is found in the dynamics of complex organizations and organizational networks. In this article, I apply concepts from three traditions in organization theory to identify structural, resource, and implementation variables that serve as either incentives or barriers to successful service coordination. Case studies and evaluations of interagency projects confirm the importance of these organizational factors in practice. Although organization theory does not provide unambiguous prescriptions for the design and implementation of interagency projects, it can alert planners and managers to the conditions under which projects have the best chances for success.

3. WELFARE REGIMES IN RELATION TO PAID WORK AND CARE

Abstract Ideologies about work, caregiving, family, and gender relations vary across countries and over time. Contemporary perspectives typically stress child well-being, women’s caregiving burden, or gender equality. The tensions among these can be resolved in societies that combine intensive parental time for children with a gender-egalitarian division of labor. Social and labor market policies that would support such a society are the most developed in the Social Democratic countries, with the Conservative countries of continental Europe and the Liberal English-speaking countries lagging substantially (most markedly, the United states). That policy variation appears to shape cross-country variation in crucial parent and child outcomes.

Public Funding and Enrollment in Formal Child Care in the 1990s

Although the share of all 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children enrolled in center‐based care and early education has grown steadily in recent decades, rates of enrollment for children from low‐income families still lag behind those for children from families with high incomes. During the 1990s, growing public funding for compensatory preschool education and means‐tested child‐care assistance had the potential to increase the availability of free or low‐cost formal child‐care arrangements and thus the attendance of low‐income children. This article analyzes repeated cross‐sectional data on formal child‐care attendance from the October Current Population Survey as well as data on state‐level funding. The results indicate that increases in public funding are positively associated with the probability that low‐income young children attended formal care. These results also suggest that gaps in formal care between low‐ and high‐income families would have widened in the absence of public investments.

Screening for Domestic Violence in Public Welfare Offices An Analysis of Case Manager and Client Interactions

Despite a high prevalence of domestic violence among welfare clients, most studies of the implementation of the Family Violence Option (FVO) under welfare reform find that women rarely receive domestic violence services in welfare offices. This study reviews findings from current research on the factors that improve the likelihood that women will reveal their domestic violence experiences to service personnel, and uses the guidelines drawn from this review to evaluate domestic violence screening practices in welfare offices using 782 transcribed interviews between welfare workers and clients from 11 sites in four states. The analysis found that only 9.3% of case encounters involved screening for domestic violence. Screening rates differed by state, interview type, and length of worker employment. Qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that the majority of screening by workers was routinized or consisted of informing clients of the domestic violence policy without asking about abuse. Only 1.2% of the interviews incorporated at least two of the procedures that increase the likelihood of disclosure among domestic violence survivors, suggesting deeply inadequate approaches to screening for abuse within the context of welfare offices, and a need for improved training, protocol, and monitoring of FVO implementation.