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.

We are grateful to Tim Smeeding and Lee Rainwater for their generous guidance and support in the development of the new policy database. We would also like to thank Sheila Kamerman for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In addition, we would like to express our appreciation to the country representatives who so generously gave us their time and expertise; their names are listed in Appendix 6. SUMMARYDespite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns of mothers' employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy "packages", these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions.The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined.The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women's labor market attachment. Prior findings on women's labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers' employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family polic...

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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 children's 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.

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This study examines the extent to which staff in local welfare systems have embraced new welfare reform goals and, if so, the extent to which local management practices contribute to the alignment of staff priorities with policy objectives. It looks at agency structure and several aspects of public management from a microperspective that prior research has linked to agency performance including training, performance monitoring, staff resources, leadership characteristics, and personnel characteristics. The research indicates that front-line workers in welfare offices continue to believe that traditional eligibility determination concerns are the most important goals at their agencies. It also finds that management practices and the structuring of agency responsibilities matter: To the extent that public managers want to redirect local staff to focus their attention on the new goals associated with welfare reform, they can create the conditions under which staff have clear signals about what is expected and could provide them with the resources and incentives to realign their priorities.The ability of public managers to influence their employees' commitment to policy and agency goals has long been an interest of scholars and practitioners of public administration. A common challenge for all public organizations is creating a commitment on the part of front-line workers to the policy decisions made by government officials. While this is key to the way that public policy is ultimately delivered, public administrators at all levels recognize the difficulty in achieving this commitment. This research builds on prior studies of goal congruence, public management, and policy achievement in government organizations to examine the extent to which staff in local welfare systems have embraced new goals established by federal and state welfare reforms and, if so, the extent to which local management practices may have contributed to the alignment of staff priorities with policy objectives. These objectives, articulated in federal and state laws during the 1990s, explicitly redirected the efforts of cash assistance programs from income maintenance to work enforcement. Implicitly, they created a new expectation that all welfare staff-from eligibility workers to employment specialists-would help to move clients off welfare and into jobs.We consider both agency structure and several aspects of public management from a microperspective that prior research has linked to agency performance-including training, performance monitoring, staff resources, leadership characteristics, and personnel characteristics.

ࡗ Expensive Children in Poor Families: Out-of-PocketExpenditures for the Care of Disabled and Chronically Ill Children in Welfare FamiliesA significant minority of poor families care for children with disabilities and chronic illnesses. This study is among the first to explore private costs resulting from children's disabilities among low-income families. We find that almost half of the sample of California AFDC families with special-needs children incurred some direct, out-ofpocket expenses in the preceding month, and about 20% incurred total costs exceeding $100. We also estimate lost employment income among low-income mothers caring for children with disabilities. We conclude that both out-of-pocket expenses and foregone earnings represent a substantial burden for many low-income families with special-needs children, and we discuss the policy implications of these findings.Chronic mental or physical impairments in childhood can impose substantial private costs on families. The costs of special medical care, therapeutic and educational services, transportation, and Center for Policy Research, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 (tmsmeed@maxwell. syr.edu).