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NATIONAL FORUM ON THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES STEERING GROUP
JULIUS B RICHMOND (Chair),
Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
WILLIAM S. WOODSIDE (Vice Chair),
Sky Chefs, Inc., New York
HENRY AARON,
The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
DREW ALTMAN,
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, California
ALAN K. CAMPBELL,
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
JAMES P. COMER,
Child Study Center, Yale University
JANE L. DELGADO,
National Coalition of Hispanic Health & Human Services, Washington, D.C.
FELTON J. EARLS,
School of Public Health, Harvard University
DONALD M. FRASER,
Office of the Mayor, Minneapolis, Minnesota
ROBERT E. FULTON,
Oklahoma Alliance for Public Policy Research, Oklahoma City
EUGENE E. GARCIA,
Board of Education, University of California, Santa Cruz
ROBERT J. HAGGERTY,
William T. Grant Foundation, New York
MARGARET C. HEAGARTY,
Department of Pediatrics, Columbia University
RUBY HEARN,
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, New Jersey
FRED M. HECHINGER,
Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York
DAVID HORNBECK, Education Adviser,
Baltimore, Maryland
JUDITH E. JONES,
National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University
JEROME KAGAN,
Department of Psychology, Harvard University
RONALD B. MINCY,
The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C.
MARTHA L. MINOW,
Harvard Law School, Harvard University
ANNE C. PETERSEN,
College of Health and Human Development, Pennsylvania State University
HAROLD A. RICHMAN,
Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago
ALLAN ROSENFIELD,
School of Public Health, Columbia University
LISBETH B. SCHORR,
Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
CAROLE SIMPSON,
ABC News, Washington, D.C.
PATRICIA A. PLACE, Project Director
DEBORAH R. BOTH, Senior Research Associate
DRUSILLA BARNES, Administrative Secretary
Preface
The Workshop on Effective Services for Young Children, held November 1 and 2, 1990, was one in a series of events that the National Forum on the Future of Children and Families has sponsored on current and emerging child and family policy issues. A joint project of the National Research Council's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and the Institute of Medicine, the forum was established in 1987 to promote an ongoing dialogue among scholars and experts in children and family issues and leaders in government, business, philanthropy, and the media. The forum provides a neutral setting for discussion of problems affecting children and families and the development of policy options and strategies to improve their health and well-being. Its mission is to enhance the policy-making capacity of the public and private sectors on behalf of children and families.
The forum's Working Group on Effective Services organized the workshop in response to evidence of a growing consensus that:
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The nation has an enormous stake in reversing the alarming deterioration of the circumstances in which poor and otherwise disadvantaged children grow up.
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Many past efforts to reverse unfavorable trends in damaging outcomes such as school failure, adolescent childbearing, substance abuse, and violent crime have been relatively ineffective.
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Much new knowledge on how to improve the institutions and programs that are meant to strengthen children and families is now available but is not being used.
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Most of the difficult unsolved problems call for remedies that cut across multiple systems and disciplines.
The forum is well situated to bring together the range of individuals and interests needed to sort through and extract from current knowledge and activities the options and strategies that could achieve major improvements in services for young children and their families. Accordingly, the forum convened a two-day workshop involving 60 invited participants to assess the state of current knowledge and to identify strategies for action. Participants included many of the nation's leaders in current efforts to improve services for children and families and many who are at the forefront of attempts to understand these efforts in the context of current experience, theory, and research. A list of participants is included in the appendix.
The presentations and discussions that took place during the two-day meeting, together with the background papers, enriched participants' understanding of available options and steps that could be taken to improve the well-being of the nation's children and their families through more effective services. Needless to say, however, not all important aspects of the provision of effective services for children were covered in this initial workshop.
With this summary of our workshop deliberations, we hope to reach a wider audience of policy makers, administrators, and practitioners. We hope that this summary and the background papers will inform future efforts to ensure that all American children and their families will benefit from the high-quality education, social services, health care, and family support services that are within the nation's capacity to provide.
The forum is grateful for the contributions of the impressive array of workshop participants and to the authors of the background papers. We are also grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which provides general support to the forum, and to the Foundation for Child Development, which has provided funding for the publication and dissemination of this report. We extend our thanks to Carol Copple, a valued consultant and one of the drafters of the summary. In addition, we wish to express appreciation to Deborah Both, the forum's senior research associate, and Drusilla Barnes, administrative secretary, for their dedicated efforts in organizing the meeting and for producing this report.
Lisbeth B. Schorr, Chair
Forum Working Group on Effective Services for Young Children
Julius B. Richmond, Chair
National Forum on the Future of Children and Families