The Magnitude of Low-Paid Gig and Independent Contract Work in New York State
By Lina Moe, James A. Parrott, and Jason Rochford
In the wake of California's groundbreaking AB5 legislation, which subjects employers to an “ABC test” that narrows the guidelines for which companies can classify their workers as independent contractors, New York State lawmakers have begun exploring similar measures to better protect workers against misclassification and exploitation.This report will argue that the misclassification of workers as independent contractors is much broader than just the online platform sector, and that many of the largest low-paying industries utilize significant numbers of independent contractors who likely are misclassified. The report estimates that there are about 150,000 app-based independent contractors in New York that constitute about 17.5 percent of over 850,000 low-paid independent contractors in the state.
Even as Youth Suicides Rise, New York State Cuts Funds For Kids’ Mental Health
By Abigail Kramer
Across New York State, children and adolescents wait weeks—or even months—to get treatment for serious mental health problems. In the coming year, mental health providers and advocates warn that the situation may get worse. Despite an increase in teen suicide attempts, State officials plan to cut payments for several mental health programs that serve young people in their homes and communities.
The programs, which rolled out at the beginning of 2019, were supposed to serve over 200,000 young people on the State’s Medicaid program with mental health or substance abuse problems. A year after their launch, however, services are reaching a tiny fraction of the kids who need them.
DATA & STATISTICS | CHILD WELFARE WATCH
Watching The Numbers (2019)
Our six years of key indicators spotlight trends in New York City’s foster care and preventive services systems.
The Road to and from Salary Parity in New York City: Nonprofits and Collective Bargaining in Early Childhood Education
By James Parrott
This report examines the progress achieved with New York City’s July 2019 commitment to early childhood education (ECE) starting pay salary parity that will raise pay for certified teachers in community-based organizations (CBOs) by 30-40 percent by October 1, 2021.
Understanding FAFSA: A How-To Guide for High School Students (And the Adults Who Help Them) (2019)
This guide is designed to help students and families navigate the U.S. Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in their quest to get financial aid for college. The guide will be particularly useful for students who are among the first in their family to go to college, or are new to the country. We hope that educators and counselors will make use of the guide.
Scrapping the SHSAT: Breaking Down Who Would Be Affected, And How
By Nicole Mader, Melanie Quiroz, and Carmen Cheung
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to end use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) would make the city’s most elite public high schools more racially and ethnically diverse. The mayor’s plan would instead offer seats at the specialized high schools to the top performers in each of the city’s public middle schools. We tested this proposal and found that, if enacted, it would give some 2,000 academically qualified Black and Latinx students each year access to higher-performing schools and a more ethnically diverse cohort of fellow students than they typically have through the current school choice process.
New York City’s $15 Minimum Wage and Restaurant Employment and Earnings
By Lina Moe, James Parrott, and Yannet Lathrop
This is the first assessment of restaurant employment and earnings over the entire period of New York City’s historic minimum wage increases, 2013-18. Contrary to fears of massive job losses, $20 Big Macs, and shuttered restaurants, we found a thriving industry.
Data Brief: Child Welfare Investigations and New York City Neighborhoods
By Angela Butel
New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) investigated nearly 60,000 allegations of abuse or neglect in 2017—in other words, one investigation for every 30 children under the age of 18 in the city. These investigations were much more heavily concentrated in some neighborhoods than others. Below, we delve into which parts of New York City experience concentrated child welfare activity and which do not. The 10 community districts in New York City with the highest rates of child poverty had rates of investigation four times higher, on average, than the 10 districts with the lowest child poverty. And among districts with similar poverty rates, those with higher concentrations of Black and Latino residents tended to have higher rates of investigation.
Moms Groups and Movie Nights: Can a New Approach to Child Welfare Win Families' Trust?
By Angela Butel
O.U.R. Place is a bright, open space dotted with fashionably rustic plywood furnishings. When I arrived on one of the first nice mornings of spring, two neighbors were there, chatting about their efforts to learn sign language. One had recently gotten a hearing aid; the other was teaching her grandson, who she suspects has developmental delays, to sign so that he can communicate. Another neighbor was talking to Emily Lopez, director of O.U.R. Place, about his struggles to connect with his son. “All he wants to do is play Fortnite,” he groaned. “I almost want to put him on punishment just so I can take his PlayStation away and we can go outside.” Lopez suggested someone she knows who might be a good mentor.
Time for a Real Look at How the New York State Workers’ Compensation System Treats Workers
By James Parrott and Nicholas B. Martin
Despite an early history as a national leader in safeguarding the interests of workers injured on the job, New York’s workers’ compensation system has eroded considerably over the years, as legislative and administrative changes have often focused on curtailing benefits rather than adapting to changes in the economy, workforce, and business practices. While legislative changes in 2007 and 2017 included some positive measures, for the most part changes significantly lessened the adequacy of worker benefits. The unfortunate result is that the focus of workers’ compensation in New York has shifted from fairly compensating injured workers to minimizing employer costs.
Report
New York State’s Historic Disinvestment in Human Services since the Great Recession: The Impact in New York City and Around the State
By James Parrott and Angela Butel
Human services aid from New York State helps localities pay for direct services, including public assistance and services provided through nonprofits. In this report we examine New York State, New York City and county budget data to understand how State funding trends affect localities across the state and New York City in particular.
brief
Banned For 28 Years: How Child Welfare Accusations Keep Women Out Of The Workforce
By Abigail Kramer
Francine Almash was not especially surprised when an investigator from New York City’s child welfare agency showed up at her door. A few months earlier, her then-10-year-old son, Shawn, who is autistic, had been pinned to a wall by a crisis counselor in his special education classroom and come home with a broken thumb. Almash refused to send him back, and so the school called the State’s child abuse hotline to report her for neglecting Shawn’s education.
Report
Screened Schools: How to Broaden Access and Diversity
By Clara Hemphill, Nicole Mader, Melanie Quiroz, and Laura Zingmond
Nearly 15% of New York City public high school students and about 18% of middle school students attend academically “screened” schools that rely on such factors as student grade point averages and standardized test scores for admission. Some educators and activists believe that screens reinforce racial and social privilege and should be abolished. “Screened Schools” addresses this subject and suggests a range of practicable strategies for increasing both diversity and educational quality in schools across the city.
Report
The New York City App-Based Driver Pay Standard: Revised Estimates For The New Pay Requirement
Prepared By: James A. Parrott, Michael Reich, Jason Rochford, and Xingxing Yang
This brief provides an update to the report that Parrott and Reich issued in July 2018, "An Earnings Standard for New York City’s App-based Drivers: Economic Analysis and Policy Assessment,” and informs the final pay standard as incorporated in the Driver Income and Transparency Rules, adopted by the NewYork City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) on December 4, 2018. The newpay standard takes effect February 1, 2019.
Report
Why Washington Matters: Federal Spending is Crucial to New York Children and Families
By Angela Butel and James Parrott
The federal government provides significant funding to localities, including New York City, which is targeted primarily to support children, families, and low-income communities. This support happens through a combination of direct benefits for individuals and families – social safety net programs such as Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – and social services categorical funding, which flows through the City budget to help provide services to individuals and families. Some federal funding streams, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), provide both kinds of funding – direct benefits to families as well as programmatic funding to states and localities.
Report
Free Preschool, Coming to an Apartment Near You: What Family Child Care Could Mean for 3K
By Kendra Hurley with Angela Butel
When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for re-election in 2017 on the ambitious promise of offering free preschool to the city’s 3-year-olds, classes in living rooms were most likely not what he or voters had in mind. But last month, just over a year into 3K’s multi-year rollout, the City Department of Education (DOE) revealed its intention to bring 3K into the more loosely regulated world of home-based child care settings.
Report
Promising Outcomes, Limited Potential: Diversity In Admissions In New York City Public Schools
By Nicole Mader, Abigail Kramer, Angela Butel
In 2016, New York City rolled out a small pilot project intended to address a problem that many in the city had long ignored or taken for granted: While New York’s public school population is one of the most diverse in the country, it is also one of the most starkly segregated by race and class. In a report, released by the Center for New York City Affairs, we assess the promises and limitations of the Diversity in Admissions initiative, as well as its outcomes so far. Using school- and grade-level data for each of the pilot schools, we created the interactive visualizations below to understand all 86 schools’ goals in the context of recent trends in the demographic makeup of their student populations. We spoke with school leaders, DOE administrators, and academic researchers to learn how these schools designed their admissions priorities and the challenges they’ve faced in implementing them. And we analyzed results at the 19 schools that participated in the initiative’s first two years.
Long Hours, High Caseloads: An Ongoing Surge of Cases Weighs on Child Welfare Workers
By Abigail Kramer
In the poorest neighborhoods of New York City, frontline child welfare workers frequently carry caseloads far above recommended levels, according to data from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which runs the City's child welfare system.
In order to keep children safe, national child welfare experts recommend that child protective caseworkers, who investigate possible cases of abuse and neglect, carry loads of no more than 12 to 14 families at a time. In many parts of the city, ACS succeeds in keeping caseloads well below that range: In Queens, for example, the average caseload was under eight families per worker in September. The citywide average was 10.1.
Brief
Child Welfare Surge Continues: Family Court Cases, Emergency Child Removals Remain Up
By Abigail Kramer
More than a year and a half after a pair of widely publicized child deaths, New York City's child welfare agency continues to investigate a dramatically higher number of families than in recent years, according to data published by the Administration for Children's Services (ACS).
Report
An Earnings Standard for New York City’s App-Based Drivers: Economic Analysis and Policy Assessment
By James A. Parrott and Michael Reich
App-based ride-hailing companies have grown rapidly in New York City and across the U.S. over the past five years, yet the full-time New York City drivers who provide 80 percent of the rides are struggling just to get by, according to a new report from The New School in New York City and the University of California, Berkeley.
The report highlights the need for and the effects of the Taxi and Limousine’s Commission’s (TLC) proposed driver pay standard, which would apply to drivers affiliated with Uber, Lyft, Via, and Juno in New York City.
The study found that 85 percent of app-based drivers earn below the proposed minimum pay level, after allowing for vehicle and related expenses. The TLC’s proposal would result in 14 percent average increase in gross pay and a 22.5 percent increase in net pay.
By The Numbers: Five Trends Re-shaping New York's Changing World of Child Care
Recent years have brought a series of rapid changes to New York City’s subsidized early education system. There was the massive EarlyLearn reform of 2012, pre-K expansion in 2014, and now the Department of Education's rollout of preschool for 3-year-olds as it prepares to take over responsibility for all City-contracted child care services. In this shifting landscape, trends in enrollment can provide a window into how parents and providers are experiencing the changes. Using point-in-time data obtained by CNYCA, we have identified five key enrollment trends in New York City’s subsidized child care system.
CHILDREN, YOUTH & FAMILIES | REPORTS
Building Health Homes for Kids: New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape
By Abigail Kramer
New York has begun its ambitious project to re-engineer health care for low-income children. In a new report, Building Health Homes for Kids: New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape, the Center for New York City Affairs looks at the opportunities and challenges presented by the State’s first major step toward reform.
Budget Watch | REPORTS
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 4 on How Businesses are Adapting to the Increasing Minimum Wage
By James Parrott
CNYCA partners with the Workforce Field Building Hub, an initiative of the NYC-based Workforce Professionals Training Institute (WPTI) on the Monitoring the Minimum Wage issue brief series. The briefs are intended to track the implementation of the $15 minimum wage in New York City by engaging businesses, workers and workforce practitioners, and by assessing the impacts in other jurisdictions around the country.
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 4 on lessons from other cities is available here.
Previous issues in the series are available here.
Education | Integration | REPORTS
The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools
By Nicole Mader, Clara Hemphill, and Qasim Abbas, Taina Guarda, Ana Carla Sant’anna Costa, and Melanie Quiroz
The conventional wisdom is that most elementary school children in New York City attend their zoned neighborhood schools and that the city’s high levels of school segregation merely reflect segregated housing patterns. But a more nuanced and in some ways disquieting story emerges from our analysis presented in a new policy report from the Center for New York City Affairs, “The Paradox of Choice.”
CHILDREN, YOUTH & FAMILIES | REPORTS
Small Children, Big Opportunities
The Department of Education Will Soon Take Charge of Child Care for Babies and Toddlers. What Can They Do to Build Capacity and Improve Quality?
The last in a series of briefs looking at child care for babies and toddlers in New York City's subsidized early education centers, this report presents our key findings. It also provides recommendations for building the centers’ capacity to provide quality infant and toddler care. With the City preparing to move its subsidized child care system from its current home at the Administration for Children’s Services to the City’s Department of Education, our advisory board of early education stakeholders, argues that now is the time to dream big when it comes to babies and toddlers, and to build a rich continuum of early education from infancy onward that will prevent the need for more costly interventions down the line.
CHILDREN, YOUTH & FAMILIES | REPORTS
Making Room For Babies?: Lessons For the Field
By Kendra Hurley
Many child care centers have seen their enrollment of 4-year-olds decline due to New York City's pre-K expansion, which has dramatically grown the number of early education options available to kids this age. In response, some centers have become interested in “aging down” to serve younger children. This would be a tremendous boon in New York City, where quality affordable and subsidized infant and toddler care is in high demand and short supply. However, "aging down" is difficult. This report looks at ways that affordable and subsidized centers who do provide infant care make it work.
Is Cuomo Ditching Kids in His Medicaid Reform Plan?
By Abigail Kramer
Even as Governor Andrew Cuomo promises to defend New Yorkers’ health care from federal funding cuts, his proposed budget threatens to kill a long-planned fix to the state’s underfunded, overburdened system of mental health services for children.
The Calculus of Race and Class: A New Look at the Achievement Gap in New York City Schools
By Nicole Mader and Ana Carla Sant’anna Costa
Decades of national research have documented the “achievement gap” among students of different racial and ethnic groups as measured by their scores on standardized tests, with White and Asian students generally outperforming their Black and Hispanic peers. Now, a new tool developed by the Integration Project at the Center for New York City Affairs allows parents, educators, and policymakers to see just how large that gap is among students at each of the city’s approximately 900 public elementary schools, both district and charter. It also shows how strongly and how frequently this gap is moderated by the household incomes of students, even within the same schools.
Keeping Teenagers out of Foster Care: Do Teen-Specialized Services Make a Difference?
By Abigail Kramer
In 2013, New York City launched an array of programs designed to keep teenagers out of the City’s foster care system.
The programs—known collectively as “teen-specialized preventive services”—represent a pivotal piece of the City’s ongoing child welfare reform agenda: to keep whittling down the number of kids who enter foster care by providing intensive, evidence-based therapy to families in crisis.
Congress Needlessly Putting Children's Health at Risk
By Abigail Kramer
A crisis in children’s health insurance may be coming to New York State.
State officials could start sending termination letters to families on its Child Health Plus insurance program as soon as early December—a development that was first reported by Politico, and which would put New York in the company of nearly a dozen other states around the country.
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 3 on Lessons From Other Cities
By James Parrott
CNYCA partners with the Workforce Field Building Hub, an initiative of the NYC-based Workforce Professionals Training Institute (WPTI) on the Monitoring the Minimum Wage issue brief series. The briefs are intended to track the implementation of the $15 minimum wage in New York City by engaging businesses, workers and workforce practitioners, and by assessing the impacts in other jurisdictions around the country.
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 3 on lessons from other cities is available here.
Previous issues in the series are available here.
Inwood NYC: Can City Hall and Community Activists Get to 'Yes' on Reshaping a Neighborhood's Feature?
By Flavia Leite
For more than a year, Inwood has been the stage of a drama featuring City Hall and activists from that largely working- and middle-class northern Manhattan neighborhood as the chief actors. The eventual outcome will not only shape one community’s future; it will have broader implications, too, previewing a process that will affect tens of thousands of New Yorkers living in roughly a dozen other neighborhoods that the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has identified for rezoning. And while the development-versus-affordability plot of the Inwood story is all too familiar in New York, research by the Center for New York City Affairs suggests ways policymakers and community leaders can learn from what has happened in Inwood and other communities, and rewrite the script in ways that might make a happier ending possible.
Growing interest in early education has led to more infant classrooms in child care centers—but they’re mostly for wealthy families.
By Kendra Hurley
Parents seeking subsidized child care for babies often hope for a spot at a licensed early education center. But almost inevitably, their babies instead wind up in subsidized home-based programs, known as family child care, where women get paid meager wages to look after neighborhood kids in their homes, and which are far less regulated than child care centers. That’s because child care centers citywide have historically had very few slots for children younger than 2 years old, in large part due to the costs and difficulties involved in meeting stringent safety regulations for infants in centers.
READ MORE | DOWNLOAD
What’s Needed for ‘3-K for All’ and Child Care Centers to Work and Play Well Together?
By Kendra Hurley
In Late April Mayor Bill de Blasio announced two new plans that could determine the future of the country’s largest child care system for poor and low-income families. First, the Mayor wants to expand his well-regarded “Pre-K for All” program for 4-year-olds (also known as universal pre-K or “UPK”) to provide free preschool to 3-year-olds as well. The projected multi-year expansion is called “3-K for All.”
ACS IN OVERDRIVE: Since the Death of a Harlem 6-Year-Old, are Fewer Families Getting the Help They Need?
By Abigail Kramer
After a series of widely publicized child deaths in 2016, New York City's child welfare system continues to struggle under a glut of new cases.
In response to a surge in child abuse and neglect reports, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has drastically increased the number of families it brings into the system, filing more cases in Family Court and placing more children in foster care.
But the resulting system-overload, they say, increases the risk of breaking up families unnecessarily, and may make children less safe.
No Heavy Lifting Required: New York City's Unambitious School 'Diversity Plan
By Nicole Mader and Ana Carla Sant'Anna Costa
Earlier this month, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) released a long-awaited plan designed to increase diversity in the city's public schools. The Center for New York City Affairs has crunched the numbers on these goals and found that they would not reflect meaningful, systemic change.
Adrift in NYC: Family Homelessness and the Struggle to Stay Together
By Kendra Hurley
As family homelessness in New York City continues to climb and the City fights to open 90 new shelters, a new report by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School offers insight into how family shelters are missing opportunities to avert a hidden but common catastrophe of homelessness: families breaking apart.
Will The Feds Kill Mental Health Reform for New York Kids?
by Abigail Kramer
House Republicans' first big effort to get rid of Obamacare has died a noisy death (at least for now). The implications for New York are big: Had the proposed “repeal and replace” American Health Care Act become law, State officials estimate that more than a million New York residents would have faced a significant loss of health care, and that the State, its counties, and hospitals would have taken a cumulative hit of more than $4.5 billion over four years.
Five Steps to Integrate New York City Elementary School (2016)
By Clara Hemphill, Lydie Raschka and Nicole Mader
The City can do much more to foster economic integration of elementary schools than the small scale efforts it has made to date. Based on our visits to 150 schools across the city over the past two years, here are five feasible steps we believe the City can take.
Integrated Schools in a Segregated City: Ten strategies that have made New York City elementary schools more diverse (2016)
By Clara Hemphill, Nicole Mader and InsideSchools staff
The staff of InsideSchools visited 80 elementary schools to find out how some formerly high-poverty schools have succeeded in attracting children from a range of races, ethnicities and income levels.
Bringing It All Home: Problems and Possibilities Facing NYC's Family Child Care (2016)
By Kendra Hurley with Janie Ziye Shen
In 2012, NYC launched one of the country's largest experiments in raising the quality of subsidized family child care. More than three years since the launch of EarlyLearnNYC, we investigated what has worked and what has not.
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Segregated Schools in Integrated Neighborhoods: The City's Schools Are Even More Divided Than Our Housing (2016)
By Clara Hemphill and Nicole Mader
In multi-ethnic New York City, why are so many elementary schools segregated by race and class? New research demonstrates that school segregation is not always the result of housing patterns.
Understanding FAFSA: A How-To Guide for High School Students (And the Adults Who Help Them) (2016)
By Kim Nauer and Sandra Salmans
This guide is designed to help students and families navigate the U.S. Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in their quest to get financial aid for college.
Rough Calculations: Will the Common Core Algebra Regents Exam Threaten NYC's Graduation Rates? (2015)
By Kim Nauer, Nicole Mader and Laura Zingmond
Nearly half of New York City students fail the Algebra 1 Regents exam on the first try. Thousands retake the exam multiple times, caught up in what teachers call the “Algebra whirlpool.”
DOWNLOAD | Education | Math & Science
What's Wrong with Math and Science in NYC High Schools? (2015)
By Clara Hemphill, Nicole Mader and Bruce Cory
While small schools have been successful in helping struggling students graduate, many do not offer the higher-level coursework that prepares students for college and careers. This policy brief offers recommendations based on the experiences of a number of successful schools.
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Conquering Teachers' Math Anxiety (2015)
By Lydie Raschka and Clara Hemphill
It’s not surprising that many elementary school teachers struggle with the Common Core State Standards for math. Many early childhood teachers are actually frightened of math. They may doubt their own ability and have chosen a profession where they think it won’t matter.
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Introducing the Baby & Toddler Takeoff (2015)
By Kendra Hurley, Abigail Kramer and Bruce Cory with Evan Pellegrino and Gail Robinson
With nearly 15 million new dollars earmarked in the 2016 city budget for the social and emotional health of the youngest New Yorkers, the city's growing interest in what's often called "infant mental health" is undeniable. This report offers the first comprehensive look at New York's key new goals and efforts to protect the well-being of babies and toddlers.
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In Need of Shelter: Protecting the city’s youngest children from the traumas of homelessness (2015)
By Kendra Hurley and Abigail Kramer
This Child Welfare Watch report describes the stresses that homelessness puts on families with young children, and explores the discontinuity between the large number of young children in the shelter system and the dearth of services available to them.
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A Better Picture of Poverty:
What Chronic Absenteeism and Risk Load Reveal About NYC's Lowest-Income Elementary Schools (2014)
By Kim Nauer, Nicole Mader, Gail Robinson and Tom Jacobs with Bruce Cory, Jordan Moss and Aryn Bloodworth
Chronic absenteeism correlates with deep poverty--high rates of homelessness, child abuse reports, male unemployment, and low levels of parental education.
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Scaling the Community School Strategy in New York City:
A Systems Building Guide (2014)
By Kassa Belay, Nicole Mader and Laura Miller
A report detailing recommendations that can help sustain the city's new community schools initiative. NYC has long been home to some of the nation's most celebrated community schools but until recently there has been little support for this strategy at the city level.
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Big Dreams for NYC's Youngest Children:
The Future of Early Care and Education (2014)
By Kendra Hurley and Abigail Kramer with Myra Rosenbaum and Alison Miller
In October 2012, New York City launched EarlyLearnNYC, a plan that would upend its system for providing subsidized child care to working class and low-income families. The goal was to take the city’s sprawling assortment of child care programs—ranging from subsidized babysitting services to nationally accredited preschools—and blend them into a unified, holistic spectrum of early education services for children from 6 weeks through 4 years old.
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Baby Steps: Poverty, chronic stress, and NY’s youngest children (2014)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, and Abigail Kramer
We look at the science of early childhood development—and we illuminate how supportive, nurturing caregivers can buffer children from the negative impacts of early adversity, including the ambient stress that so often accompanies intractable poverty.
Building Blocks for Better Schools:
How the Next Mayor Can Prepare New York's Students for College and Careers (2013)
By Clara Hemphill, Kim Nauer, Andrew White and Thomas Jacobs
We analyze the successes and failures of Mayor Bloomberg's education initiatives—and proposes six key areas on which the next administration should focus attention and resources. A top priority: Make sure young children can read.
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Brushes With The Law:
Young New Yorkers and the Criminal Justice System (2013)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, and Abigail Kramer
In the final year under the administration of Mayor Bloomberg, who has made juvenile justice one of the signature issues of his time in office, we consider the progress of reforms and the places where they’ve been stymied. And we look at the impact on communities that have long been destabilized by cycles of crime, police scrutiny, arrest and incarceration.
Creating College Ready Communities:
Preparing NYC's Precarious New Generation of College Students (2013)
By Kim Nauer and Paul Tainsh with Andrew White, Tara Bahl, Sandra Salmans, Anna Schneider, Jared Carrano and Tom Jacobs
This report seeks to illuminate the latest college access efforts, and to shed new light on the complicated circumstances that allow some students to go to college and succeed—and so many others to fail. I
New York City's College Ready Communities Initiative:
Evaluation and Documentation (2009 - 2012)
By Paul Tainsh, Andrew White, Kim Nauer, Thomas Jacobs and Laurie Goldkind
Our evaluation of four unique collaboratives found large improvements in college access, college knowledge and college-going culture in many of the schools, and identified large hurdles that remain for NYC to address.
One Step Back: The Delayed Dream of Community Partnerships (2012)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, and Abigail Kramer
This edition looks at the progress of the city’s community partnerships, at their accomplishments as well as their very real limitations, and at the vision they still represent for a child welfare system that answers to the communities it’s designed to serve.
In Transition: A better future for youth leaving foster care (2011)
By Andrew White, Clara Hemphill, Kendra Hurley, and Abigail Kramer
This special double edition of Child Welfare Watch reports that homelessness and severe economic hardship are widespread for young people aging out of New York City foster care.
Managing By The Numbers: Empowerment and Accountability in NYC's Schools (2010)
By Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer with Helen Zelon, Thomas Jacobs, Alessandra Raimondi, Sharan McCloskey and Rajeev Yerneni
The report offers one of the first broad analyses of the Bloomberg administration's reorganization of school management, explaining how principal empowerment and school accountability are intertwined, and how this management structure is shaping children's lives. The report identifies important gains as well as troubling problems.
A Need for Correction:
Reforming New York's Juvenile Justice System (2009)
By Andrew White, Clara Hemphill, and Kendra Hurley
In the wake of a federal Department of Justice investigation that found widespread use of excessive force by staff at four OCFS facilities upstate, this new report identifies shortcomings in mental health services and explores possible solutions, including the expansion of alternatives to incarceration for juvenile delinquents.
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The New Marketplace: How Small-School Reforms and School Choice Have Reshaped NYC's High Schools (2009)
By Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer with Helen Zelon and Thomas Jacobs
A report on the city's public high schools, revealing that Chancellor Joel Klein's high school reforms created valuable new opportunities but also caused collateral damage.
Hard Choices: Caring for the children of mentally ill parents (2009)
By Andrew White, Clara Hemphill, Kendra Hurley, Ann Farmer, and Maia Szalavitz
A joint report with the Center for an Urban Future documenting the issues facing poor and working class parents with mental illness and their children.
Homes Away From Home: Foster Parents For A New Generation (2008)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, Barbara Solow, Ann Farmer, Laura Longhine, and Helaine Olen
This issue documents how foster parents are adjusting to their increasingly demanding role, and how the system is struggling to meet their needs—as well as those of the children in their care, which may include anything from mental health care to prenatal care and parenting programs for pregnant teens.
Against the Clock: The Struggle to Move Kids into Permanent Homes (2008)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, Barbara Solow, Kathleen Carroll, Keach Hagey, Kim Nauer, Joan Oleck, Helaine Olen
This issue explores the challenges of moving the city’s foster children into safe, permanent homes quickly, a decade after federal laws sought to improve foster care systems nationwide.
Pressures and Possibilities:
Supporting Families and Children at Home (2007)
By Andrew White, Kendra Hurley, Barbara Solow, Eve Heyn, Nora McCarthy
This issue published jointly with the Center for an Urban Future, explores the transformation of the city’s network of nonprofit family support agencies as they become increasingly central to the Bloomberg administration’s strategy for protecting children from abuse and neglect.
Gaining Access: New Efforts on Housing and Autism Services (2007)
By Andrew White and Barbara Solow
This issue reports on publicly funded services for the rapidly growing number of New Yorkers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and on attempts to create affordable housing opportunities for people with developmental disabilities.
A Schoolyard in Brooklyn: Strengthening Families and Communities Through the Innovative Use of Public Space (2007)
As part of PlaNYC 2030, Mayor Bloomberg recently proposed opening 290 city schoolyards to the public during non-school hours. A Schoolyard in Brooklyn offers a proven model for how to do it right, strengthening families and communities along the way.
Half Full, Half Empty: Children and Families with Special Needs (2007)
This issue of describes the impact of a longstanding dispute that has left children and families without the respite care, in-home assistance and other family supports that can help make it possible for young people with disabilities to live healthy and more fulfilling lives.
There's No Such Place: The Family Assessment Program, PINS and the Limits of Support Services for Families with Teens in New York City (2007)
Reforms in New York City's system for handling troubled teens have helped more vulnerable young people avoid long hours in Family Court and prolonged stints in foster care. But there are signs that the new Family Assessment Program hasn't yet had a substantial impact on the larger problems facing many urban teens and their families—problems that are often inseparable from the poverty and violence in their communities.
The Innovation Issue: New Initiatives in New York Child Welfare (2005)
This issue of Child Welfare Watch highlights some of the new initiatives that are improving parental visits for children in foster care, providing homes where families can reunify after children have been removed from the home, and creating much-needed pilot mental health clinics in foster care agencies.
Spanning the Neighborhood:
The Bridge Between Housing and Supports for Families (2005)
New York City has begun to reshape and expand its services to prevent family homelessness in a more comprehensive and coordinated way than ever before. But much more could be done. This report proposes a substantial new effort to root homelessness prevention in neighborhood-based safety net programs run by well-known, trusted community organizations.
Community Collaboration in New York City:
Charting the Course for a Neighborhood-Based Safety Net (2005)
As "prevention" has become the mantra of New York City social policy, from child welfare to family homelessness and beyond, city officials and nonprofit leaders have pursued new strategies to achieve the old objective of building a more efficient, integrated and collaborative safety net for families. This report explores why integrated services matter at the community level.
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Pivot Point: Managing the Transformation of Child Welfare in NYC (2005)
By Andrew White
This report documents contradictions that have emerged as the city reduces the size of its foster care system, but struggles to boost investments in the alternative, preventive family support services that help keep families stable and together.
A Matter of Judgement:
Deciding the Future of Family Court in NYC (2005)
This issue reports on the city’s Family Court, the beginnings of reform, and the chaotic upsurge in cases following the Nixzmary Brown murder.
Hardship in Many Languages: Immigrant Families and Children in NYC (2004)
This report highlights current research on immigrant families and poverty, examines several key aspects of the social support sector—food stamps, child care, neighborhood family services and other programs—and explains how publicly funded programs have been slow to adapt to serving New York's newcomers.
Tough Decisions: Dealing with Domestic Violence (2003)
This report documents changes in policy, practice and enforcement in the wake of the federal injunction imposed in the Nicholson v. Williams class action lawsuit. The lawsuit challenged the practice of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services, in cases of suspected abuse and neglect that involve domestic violence, of too often removing children from their mothers unnecessarily and circumventing the women’s due process rights.
Uninvited Guests: Teens in NYC Foster Care (2002)
By Andrew White, Rachel Blustain, Wendy Davis, David Jason Fischer, Kendra Hurley, Nora MCarthy, Erin Ortiz, Brooke Ritchie
This edition of Child Welfare Watch offers an in-depth examination of the issues facing teenagers in New York City’s foster care system.
Supporting Stronger Families and Neighborhoods:
City Hall and New York's Family and Children's Services (2001)
The Bloomberg administration has an opportunity to gain new trust from communities that have long held deep suspicion for City Hall and the city’s child welfare authorities. This report provides specific recommendations and proposed policy changes to form a road map for a sustained and ambitious child welfare reform effort.