Future of Children

Despite a general rise in the return to college, likely due to technological change, the cost-benefit calculus facing prospective students can make the decision to invest in and attend college dauntingly complex. Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic review research on the varying costs and benefits of higher education and explore in full the complexity of the decision to invest in and attend college. Optimal college attainment decisions are different for all prospective students, who diverge in terms of what they are likely to get out of higher education and what specific options might be best for them...

This overview of postsecondary education in the United States reviews the dramatic changes over the past fifty years in the students who go to college, the institutions that produce higher education, and the ways it is financed. The article, by Sandy Baum, Charles Kurose, and Michael McPherson, creates the context for the articles that follow on timely issues facing the higher education community and policy makers. The authors begin by observing that even the meaning of college has changed. The term that once referred primarily to a four-year period of academic study now applies to virtually any postsecondary study--academic or occupational, public or private, two-year or four-year-- that can result in a certificate or degree...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

As this issue of the Future of Children makes clear, we have much yet to learn about military children and their families. A big part of the reason, write Anita Chandra and Andrew London, is that we lack sufficiently robust sources of data. Until we collect more and better data about military families, Chandra and London say, we will not be able to study the breadth of their experiences and sources of resilience, distinguish among subgroups within the diverse military community, or compare military children with their civilian counterparts...

Military children don't exist in a vacuum; rather, they are embedded in and deeply influenced by their families, neighborhoods, schools, the military itself, and many other interacting systems. To minimize the risks that military children face and maximize their resilience, write Harold Kudler and Colonel Rebecca Porter, we must go beyond clinical models that focus on military children as individuals and develop a public health approach that harnesses the strengths of the communities that surround them. In short, we must build communities of care...

When a service member is injured or dies in a combat zone, the consequences for his or her family can be profound and long-lasting. Visible, physical battlefield injuries often require families to adapt to long and stressful rounds of treatment and rehabilitation, and they can leave the service member with permanent disabilities that mean new roles for everyone in the family. Invisible injuries, both physical and psychological, including traumatic brain injury and combat-related stress disorders, are often not diagnosed until many months after a service member returns from war (if they are diagnosed at all-many sufferers never seek treatment)...

How are children's lives altered when a parent goes off to war? What aspects of combat deployment are most likely to put children at risk for psychological and other problems, and what resources for resilience can they tap to overcome such hardships and thrive? To answer these questions, Patricia Lester and Lieutenant Colonel Eric Flake first examine the deployment cycle, a multistage process that begins with a period of anxious preparation after a family receives notice that a parent will be sent into combat...

Much research on children in military families has taken a deficit approach--that is, it has portrayed these children as a population susceptible to psychological damage from the hardships of military life, such as frequent moves and separation from their parents during deployment. But M. Ann Easterbrooks, Kenneth Ginsburg, and Richard M. Lerner observe that most military children turn out just fine. They argue that, to better serve military children, we must understand the sources of strength that help them cope with adversity and thrive...

The U.S. military has come to realize that providing reliable, high-quality child care for service members' children is a key component of combat readiness. As a result, the Department of Defense (DoD) has invested heavily in child care. The DoD now runs what is by far the nation's largest employer-sponsored child-care system, a sprawling network with nearly 23,000 workers that directly serves or subsidizes care for 200,000 children every day. Child-care options available to civilians typically pale in comparison, and the military's system, embedded in a broader web of family support services, is widely considered to be a model for the nation...

Because most research on military families has focused on children who are old enough to go to school, we know the least about the youngest and perhaps most vulnerable children in these families. Some of what we do know, however, is worrisome--for example, multiple deployments, which many families have experienced during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may increase the risk that young children will be maltreated. Where the research on young military children is thin, Joy Osofsky and Lieutenant Colonel Molinda Chartrand extrapolate from theories and research in other contexts--especially attachment theory and research on families who have experienced disasters...

For military children and their families, the economic news is mostly good. After a period of steady pay increases, James Hosek and Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth write, service members typically earn more than civilians with a comparable level of education. Moreover, they receive many other benefits that civilians often do not, including housing allowances, subsidized child care, tuition assistance, and top-of-the-line comprehensive health care. Of course, service members tend to work longer hours than civilians do, and they are exposed to hazards that civilians rarely, if ever, face...

Since the advent of the all-volunteer force in the 1970s, marriage, parenthood, and family life have become commonplace in the U.S. military among enlisted personnel and officers alike, and military spouses and children now outnumber service members by a ratio of 1.4 to 1. Reviewing data from the government and from academic and nonacademic research, Molly Clever and David R. Segal find several trends that distinguish today's military families. Compared with civilians, for example, service members marry younger and start families earlier...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Advances in digital technologies are dramatically altering the texts and tools available to teachers and students. These technological advances have created excitement among many for their potential to be used as instructional tools for literacy education. Yet with the promise of these advances come issues that can exacerbate the literacy challenges identified in the other articles in this issue. In this article Gina Biancarosa and Gina Griffiths characterize how literacy demands have changed in the digital age and how challenges identified in other articles in the issue intersect with these new demands...

Although the education community has identified numerous effective interventions for improving the literacy of U.S. schoolchildren, little headway has been made in raising literacy capabilities. David K. Cohen and Monica P. Bhatt, of the University of Michigan, contend that a major obstacle is the organizational structure of the U.S. education system. Three features in particular--the lack of educational infrastructure, a decentralized governance system, and the organization of teaching as an occupation--stymie efforts to improve literacy instruction...

Learning to read--amazing as it is to small children and their parents--is one thing. Reading to learn, explains Susan Goldman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is quite another. Are today's students able to use reading and writing to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal, and professional arenas? Do they have the literacy skills necessary to meet the demands of the twenty-first century? To answer these questions, Goldman describes the increasingly complex comprehension, reasoning skills, and knowledge that students need as they progress through school and surveys what researchers and educators know about how to teach those skills...

Although most young children seem to master reading skills in the early grades of elementary school, many struggle with texts as they move through middle school and high school. Why do children who seem to be proficient readers in third grade have trouble comprehending texts in later grades? To answer this question, Nonie Lesaux describes what is known about reading development and instruction, homing in on research conducted with children from low-income and non-English-speaking homes. Using key insights from this research base, she offers two explanations...

Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the National Research Council's seminal report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which provided research-based recommendations on what could be done to better position students in prekindergarten through third grade for success in grade four and above. This article by Nell Duke and Meghan Block first examines whether specific key recommendations from the report have been implemented in U.S. classrooms. They find that recommendations regarding increased access to kindergarten and greater attention to and improvement of students' word-reading skills have been widely adopted...

When U.S. children enter school, their reading skills vary widely by their socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and immigrant status. Because these literacy gaps exist before children enter school, observes Jane Waldfogel, the disparities must arise from conditions outside of schools--from the children's families and communities. And the same out-of-school factors may continue to influence reading skills as children progress through school. Waldfogel examines how specific out-of-school factors may contribute to literacy gaps at school entry and to the widening of the gaps for some groups thereafter...