Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/JulieMurray

This report describes the implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in school districts and schools with large enrollments of English language learners (ELLs) and immigrant students. The study, part of a series on the education of young immigrant students, documents how this landmark legislation in education policy played out in three high-ELL districts and six schools and traces the law’s effect on the education of ELL students attending these schools. The research, which takes a case study approach, addresses the following questions: 1) How has NCLB been implemented in high-ELL schools? 2) What has been the effect of NCLB on the improvement of high-ELL schools? and 3) What has been the effect of NCLB on ELL students in high-ELL schools? The findings reveal that, while implementation of NCLB in high-LEP schools has resulted in some problems for ELL students’ education, the net effect of the law has been positive because it has increased attention paid to ELL students; increased the alignment of curriculum, instruction, professional development, and testing; and raised the bar for ELL student achievement.

This study, conducted in an urban and rural county in two states, Oklahoma and Kentucky, sought to provide a detailed description of how families do or do not connect to services in alternative response system in the two study states. Using data collected from interviews and focus groups with child welfare agency staff, community service providers, and families, the study identified six factors that affect how families connect to needed services, including service network infrastructure, relationships between providers, and service availability, and offered implications as to how these findings could be applied to policy and practice.

Most foster children are not living with their fathers at the time they are removed from their homes. While in foster care these children may experience even less contact with their nonresident fathers. This study examined child welfare practices with respect to identifying, locating, and involving fathers of children in foster care including whether child support resources were used. Local agency caseworkers were interviewed by phone about nearly 2,000 foster children in four study states. The study found that nonresident fathers are not often involved in case planning and nearly half were never contacted by the child welfare agency.

U.S. schools are experiencing rapid demographic change due to high levels of immigration, while they at the same time they are implementing the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. NCLB holds schools accountable for the performance of limited English proficient (LEP) children and other groups that include many children of immigrants. This report describes the demographics of children of immigrants, and the considerable overlap among NCLB's protected groups: LEPs, low-income students, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The report describes variations in characteristics among children with parents born in different countries, and discusses implications for NCLB implementation in high-LEP schools and districts. [View the corresponding press release]

This report highlights key components of current marriage education programs, identifies opportunities and challenges for expanding services into other service delivery systems, and provides recommendations for evaluations of healthy marriage programs. Researchers conducted a total of 58 telephone discussions with program providers and visited five geographic areas with multiple programs. Findings consider aspects of service delivery settings, target groups served, program scope, funding mechanisms, and collaborative relationships between marriage programs and other service delivery organizations.

This report presents a systematic review of evaluations of marriage and relationship programs. The review analyzes 39 studies representing the highest quality evidence available in the field of marriage research and finds an average effect size of .68 for improving relationship satisfaction and .26 for improving relationship communication. The studies were screened from over 12,000 marriage research abstracts and more than 500 marriage program evaluations conducted since 1960. The current review supports evidence from previous narrative reviews and meta-analyses that marriage and relationship programs provide benefits for the couples they serve.

In this brief we examine levels of receipt for government payments that children in kinship care are eligible to receive. We find that children's receipt of financial assistance is still low given their eligibility. Many, if not most, families that could be eligible for the most generous payment, a foster payment, do not receive it. Children whose living situations make them ineligible for foster care payments have surprisingly low levels of receipt for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) child-only benefits, often their only source for financial assistance.

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