News and Opinions

Jennifer Lansford helps explain the science behind why children find their parents annoying in a recent episode of BBC’s Crowd Science podcast.  

Helen Ladd was cited for her research on public education spending in WRAL’s analysis of North Carolina schools.

Anna Gassman-Pines joined a recent episode of A Health Podyssey, the Health Affairs podcast to speak about her research on the health disparities experienced by unemployed Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ladd argues, [public school funding] must be used “productively and efficiently to promote good educational outcomes.” Charters, by design, “operate outside state and local education systems,” to varying degrees depending on which state we’re talking about. Ladd observes that this creates several challenges.

The national shortage of baby formula in the U.S. that began in February of 2022 cast an urgent spotlight on the difficulties parents can face in meeting basic nutritional needs of their babies. A narrow focus on the supply of infant formula or the benefits of breastfeeding does not shed light on the full scope of economic tradeoffs families face.

A child’s ability to succeed in the classroom is powerfully influenced by their home environment. Giving parents the support they need could be key to fixing American education.

The NC Center for Resilience & Learning is teaching schools and districts how to better help students who have experienced trauma.

EdNC spoke with Lansford about her time at CCFP, her policy goals, and what keeps her up at night.

Net Worth Poverty. It’s the other half of the income story that gets overlooked when talking about poverty. Researchers found that family wealth, the value of a family’s assets, such as savings and property, minus debt, is linked to lower cognitive scores and increases in problem and behavior scores in children.

A broader look at family finances can lead to better-designed programs that address child wellbeing.

Research seems to indicate that early childhood education can be a stepping stone to success later on in life. But preschools vary greatly in their philosophies, curricula and quality of teaching staff, so not every school will make the same impact.

A childhood intervention program called Fast Track improves family life into the second generation, report researchers.

Sarah Komisarow is among nine early- to mid-career faculty from across Duke campus and the School of Medicine who have been recognized for pursuing new directions and ideas to enhance novel research and scholarship at Duke.

Babinski and team will design, develop, and test an online professional development program called Bridging English Language Learning and Academics (BELLA) for improving teacher and student outcomes for working with English Learners.

The debate over school discipline often devolves into whether stricter rules create more orderly school environments or produce dire consequences for students. A new report looking at principals’ disciplinary styles suggests that both outcomes could be true.

Jennifer Lansford, research professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, will be the new director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy as of July 1, Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley announced today.

The Office of the Provost has selected 18 projects for funding through The Duke Endowment that engage topics related to the issue of racial inequality. Among those selected include projects led by CCFP’s Anna Gassman-Pines, Beth Gifford and Sarah Komisarow during the 2022-2023 academic year. 

State and local taxpayers cover the operating costs of charter schools, as well as the negative spillovers that they impose on local school districts. This public funding requires policy makers to pay attention not only to the benefits for enrolled students, but also to the collective or public interests that justify public funding for education.

Early childhood experts and community leaders from North Carolina and across the country described the needs of young children and families and how our systems, policies, and government structures could better address those needs.

Hosted at Duke University, the gathering, “Building a Universal System for Families with Young Children in North Carolina,” was organized by the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and by The Hunt Institute.

Prior to the pandemic, Jennifer Lansford and her colleagues were conducting in-depth, multi-year research on children and families in nine countries. They are now expanding their research to consider COVID-19 and children and parents’ mental health.

Helen Ladd presents The Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Lecture: How Charter Schools Disrupt Good Education Policy at Wellesley.

A bipartisan report on the challenges and opportunities facing children in America stresses the need to rebalance national investments toward children.

Questionable spending on contract buyouts for fired coaches at the University of South Carolina has state lawmakers demanding answers. It’s a familiar story at colleges across the country.

Early childhood education (ECE) and its counterpart, childcare, are indispensable in the effort to maximize the percentage of our population that has the necessary education and opportunity to not only function but to succeed and grow and thrive in a global economy.

There is now a consensus that children learned much less than usual — and that their mental health suffered — when schools were shut for months in 2020 and 2021. But Covid-related school shutdowns did not really end during Omicron. They instead became more subtle, often involving individual schools, classrooms or groups of students, rather than entire districts.

Jennifer Lansford joins Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley on the Policy 360 podcast to discuss ongoing research in nine countries around the world related to COVID-19 and parents’ and young people’s mental health.

February 8, 2022 — A bipartisan report released today on the challenges and opportunities facing children in America stresses the need to rebalance national investments toward children. The consensus report, “Rebalancing: Children First,” is released by the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Institution Working Group on Childhood in the United States. More than three years in the…

As the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots grow, so do the lines of people looking to buy a ticket. That’s good news for state coffers and the public education programs they fund. In many states, a significant share of lottery revenue helps finance public higher education.

Exposure to lead in drinking water from private wells during early childhood is associated with an increased risk of being reported for delinquency during teenage years, according to a new study.

As omicron threatens to lead to more school closures, a new study by researchers at Duke and Columbia looks at the pressures of such closures on families.

Much attention has recently focused on early childhood education (ECE), thanks in part to its inclusion in President Biden’s Build Back Better bill. A new study by Robert C. Carr and colleagues investigated how the longitudinal effects of ECE are mediated by the quality of the K–12 schooling that follows.

In this podcast episode Gassman-Pines offers an overview of their findings and discusses how what they learned fits within the larger context of low-wage work in the United States.

The vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are resolved without a trial. Duke researchers designed and implemented a data collection system that was piloted in prosecution offices in Durham, NC, and Berkshire, MA.

Our analysis shows that in spite of the safety net programs that support families residing in poverty, those living at or below twice the federal poverty line, devote a substantial share of their monthly expenditures to goods and services necessary for basic shelter, health, and nutrition.

Researchers continue to explore how to sustain the benefits that early childhood education (ECE) generates.

Jennifer Lansford breaks down parents’ behavioral control versus psychological control and why they are important for children’s development.

Family Connects International in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Are kids and teenagers stressed, depressed and scared? How do they see themselves and their families changed by the pandemic? And how has their behavior changed to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in their daily life?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones urged supporters of public education in North Carolina on Oct. 26 to organize to fight “anti-history laws” being promoted by Republican lawmakers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones urged supporters of public education in North Carolina on Tuesday to organize to fight “anti-history laws” being promoted by Republican lawmakers.

Our nation’s social infrastructure is composed of the economic and social investments that are necessary for U.S. workers and families to be able to take care of their loved ones and remain productive members of the U.S. workforce.

North Carolina is home to one of the most famous early childhood research studies, the Carolina Abecedarian Project, which for decades has affected research, policy, and public knowledge about the importance of early childhood experiences.

Family Connects is an evidence-based program, building on research that indicates more than 90 percent of families can use some additional support.

Our economy will be stronger and our families will be more secure tomorrow if we invest in care today.

Like other social enterprises focused on helping formerly incarcerated people, Café Momentum, located in Dallas, provides paid work for young people looking to get another start. But it also layers multiple forms of support — education, basic supplies and real-world skills — that are key to staying out of the system but hard for many youth to find at home.

The staffing shortage has become a defining feature of this school year.