Asset Building Program: All Related Content

HHS Proposes New Child Care Rules

  • By
  • Conor Williams
May 21, 2013

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on New America's Early Education Initiative blog. Conor Williams recently joined the Early Education Initiative as a Senior Researcher. He's just completed a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, a degree he pursued after teaching first grade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Conor's research addresses the challenges immigrant families face in the American education system, educational equity as a means to increased social mobility, and the history of education in the United States.

In an era of Washington gridlock, there’s almost nothing quite as gratifying as seeing big policy changes that echo one’s recent arguments. Along those lines, Thursday was a great day for advocates of more and higher-quality child care in the United States. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new Obama administration proposal to raise the federal baseline for subsidized child care centers across the country. 

Education Watch Podcast: The Hell of (and Hope for) American Daycare

May 20, 2013
Last week, at an event based on the New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, Reid Cramer, director of New America’s Asset Building Program, further explored the dismal state of American child care and started a conversation about potential strategies to improve our early education system more broadly.

Asset Building News Week, May 13-17

  • By
  • Elliot Schreur
May 17, 2013
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The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on 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 inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.

$aveNYC Evaluation: People Save, Lives Improved, More Please

  • By
  • Justin King
May 17, 2013
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What if I told you that very poor people, living in the most expensive city in America in the aftermath of a massive economic collapse, were challenged to save $500 and not touch it for a year with the promise of a 50 percent bonus if they succeeded? Do you think that some of them would be able to do it? A few?

What would you think the impact of that small amount of money would be? Equally small? Would you think that sequestering those resources would make families more likely to go into debt? More likely to skip paying their bills?

The Nightmare of Daycare

  • By
  • Elizabeth Weingarten
May 16, 2013
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Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

Putting the Kibosh on Using Credit Checks in Hiring Decisions

  • By
  • Hannah Emple
May 14, 2013

The use of credit checks to inform hiring decisions has been getting some much deserved scrutiny recently. Over the weekend, Charles Ellison for the Philadelphia Tribune and Gary Rivlin for the New York Times took a look at the practice of employers evaluating a job applicant's credit as part of the employment decision-making process. Ellison chronicles recent legislative efforts to curb the practice and points out that campaign finance data shows lawmakers are receiving sums of money from major credit reporting companies. Rivlin spoke with non-profit service providers and unemployed individuals who have experienced the negative effects of this phenomenon first hand.

On the surface, using credit checks as part of employment screening may seem like a simple, data-driven way for employers to ascertain a candidate's reliability. Upon closer inspection, however, using credit checks in this way is ineffective and exacerbates inequality.

Event Summary: The Hell of American Day Care

  • By
  • Elliot Schreur
May 14, 2013
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The Asset Building Program and New America’s Early Education Initiative co-hosted an event yesterday on “The Hell of American Daycare,” so titled after a recent piece by Jonathan Cohn for The New Republic. Cohn and a panel of experts explored this controversial issue at the intersection between early education and the American workforce. Asset Building Program director Reid Cramer introduced the subject of child care as an “issue at the heart of the social contract.” The event made clear that today’s workforce cannot succeed without adequate, affordable child care to which it can entrust its children; that those children cannot succeed without safe, stimulating experiences in their earliest years; and that tomorrow’s workforce will not thrive without the formative educational experiences only pre-kindergarten learning can provide.

Student Loan Debt May Put Young Adults in Financially Precarious Standing

  • By
  • Terri Friedline
May 13, 2013
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Student loan debt has been in the news a lot these days. In the last week, a number of news outlets wrote about mounting student loan debt and the delaying of life events by their borrowers (see ABC News, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN Money, the NY Times [here and here], and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few). The article in the NY Times provides a great example of this, "Consider Shane Gill, a 33-year-old high-school teacher in New York City. He does not have a car. He does not own a home. He is not married. And he is no anomaly: like hundreds of thousands of others in his generation, he has put off such major purchases or decisions in part because of his debts."

Critics: Credit Checks Perpetuate Discrimination | The Philadelphia Tribune

May 12, 2013

“People of color are more likely to have ‘poor credit’ because of historical and contemporary forms of discrimination that limit opportunities,” argues Hannah Emple, a policy analyst with the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program. “A low credit score thus becomes more of a proxy for a person’s experience with discriminatory structures rather than a measure of their ability to repay loans in a responsible and timely manner.”

Original article

Asset Building News Week, May 6-10

  • By
  • Elliot Schreur
May 10, 2013
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The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on 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 housing, retirement, wealth disparities, employment, and government assistance.

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