Family & Children

Editor's note: This entry was originally posted on Ed Money Watch a blog from the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project.

When the federal government distributes education funding via formulas, it typically takes several things into account. Chief among the data typically used are state- and school district-level poverty rates as determined through the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates the Census Bureau conducts annually. These poverty rate estimates show the percentage of children age 5-17 living in families with total income below the poverty rate. Recently, the Census Bureau made those estimates available for 2010, providing a unique look into how poverty rates have shifted as a result of the economic recession. Those data are now available on the Federal Education Budget Project’s website (Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative). Users can compare poverty rates over time and view them in tandem with data on federal funding, student achievement, and other demographics.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on the The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include alternatives to mainstream banking, EITC awareness, financial literacy, income and wealth inequality, homeownership, bankruptcy, and weakened social protection.

As we announced last week, the Asset Building Program and the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis are co-releasing a series of reports, Creating a Financial Stake in College, by William Elliott III on the importance of children's savings and college outcomes. The second report in the series is being released today and is available for download here. The press release from last week is also available here.

During one of our recent events, Sheldon Garon of Princeton University and Ray Boshara of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis referred to the weak household balance sheet as one of the core economic challenges of our time, suggesting that households must focus on asset-building rather than rely on credit and debt.

As a child, I knew Santa was keeping an eye on me. Not because of that vague "naughty or nice" nonsense, but because my parents had a direct line to the jolly man from the north. A hotline, in fact. When my siblings and I misbehaved, my mother would pick up the phone and start to dial 1-800-YO-SANTA as she warned us that Santa was about to get an earful. She'd inform him that I was picking on my younger brother, or that he had been caught removing the screen in his bedroom window and attempting to climb onto the roof (again). She was such a tattle-tale.

Tomorrow, October 20th, Justin King from the Asset Building Program is speaking at a briefing organized by the Congressional Out of Poverty Caucus. See the details below from the briefing invitation.

The early childhood community has long bemoaned that preparation programs for early childhood teachers do not include enough emphasis on infants and toddlers. A national survey in 2006 found that nearly half of early childhood education bachelor’s degree programs and a third of associate’s degree programs did not require any courses with a focus on infants and toddlers.

A recent policy brief provides recommendations for states and the federal government on how to fill these preparation gaps.

This afternoon I attended "The State of Health Care Conference: Strategies for Success in 2011," in Sacramento, and the event provided an impressive overview of what California faces in implementing health care reform. Nearly as impressive were the local "smarty-pants" who will attempt this Herculean feat.

Today the Asset Building Program in California attended the Bay Area Asset Funders Network's first regional conference, entitled "Addressing the Disparate Impact of Foreclosure on Households and Communities of Color." We (and by we, I mean me) entered the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco this morning with a sense of what would follow: damning data showing how and why people of color lost more in the crisis, along with an overwhelming picture of what it might take to fix the problem. But I got more than I bargained for.

In the 2011 California legislative session, the California Asset Building Program is advancing the following state policy initiatives (See printer-friendly downloadable agenda at right under Related Files):