Successful social policies for children are critical to America's future. Yet the status of children in America suggests that the nation's policies may not be serving them well. Infant and child mortality rates in the U.S. remain high compared to other western industrialized nations; child poverty rates have worsened in the past decade; poor health care, child abuse, and inadequate schooling and child care persist.

This book presents a new set of social policies designed to alleviate these problems and to help satisfy the needs of all children. The policies deal with the seven critical domains affecting children from birth through the passage to adulthood: child care, schooling, transition to work, health care, income security, physical security, and child abuse.

While nearly everyone agrees that children are in trouble, there is considerable debate over what kind of trouble they are in, why this is so, and whether government can or should more actively seek to solve these problems. Americans are evenly divided on the question of whether children's problems are more economic or moral in origin. The seven proposals in this volume both reflect and cut across ideological disagreements. Some call for more government, others call for less, and all call for different government methods for achieving socially agreed upon goals.

Recommendations include: replacing major welfare programs and tax subsidies with a set of universal policies, including national health insurance, child support assurance, and universal child care; offering publicly funded vouchers to allow poor children in inner-city neighborhoods to choose their own schools; using both private and governmental resources to get tough on crime through more stringent criminal justice policies and dramatic social measures; and expanding apprenticeship programs for non-college bound youths.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Barbara R. Bergmann and Robert I. Lerman, American University; Douglas J. Besharov, American Enterprise Institute; John J. DiIulio, Jr., Princeton University; Julia Graham Lear, George Washington University; and Diane Ravitch, New York University.

The American racial order--the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation's races and ethnicities--is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. "Creating a New Racial Order" takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama's election--not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, "Creating a New Racial Order" examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, and ability grouping. While these are all separate problems, much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict between policies designed to promote each student's ability to succeed and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and often conflict with policies that are intended to benefit everyone. They propose a framework that builds on our nation's rapidly changing population in order to help Americans get past acrimonious debates about schooling. Their goal is to make public education work better so that all children can succeed.

The American racial order--the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation's races and ethnicities--is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. "Creating a New Racial Order" takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama's election--not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, "Creating a New Racial Order" examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent.

Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks.

Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.

A democracy falters when most of its citizens are uninformed or misinformed, when misinformation affects political decisions and actions, or when political actors foment misinformation - the state of affairs the United States faces today, as this timely book makes painfully clear. In Do Facts Matter? Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein start with Thomas Jefferson's ideal citizen, who knows and uses correct information to make policy or political choices. What, then, the authors ask, are the consequences if citizens are informed but do not act on their knowledge? More serious, what if they do act, but on incorrect information? Analyzing the use, nonuse, and misuse of facts in various cases - such as the call to impeach Bill Clinton, the response to global warming, Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court, the case for invading Iraq, beliefs about Barack Obama's birthplace and religion, and the Affordable Care Act - Hochschild and Einstein argue persuasively that errors of commission (that is, acting on falsehoods) are even more troublesome than errors of omission. While citizens' inability or unwillingness to use the facts they know in their political decision making may be frustrating, their acquisition and use of incorrect ""knowledge"" pose a far greater threat to a democratic political system. Do Facts Matter? looks beyond individual citizens to the role that political elites play in informing, misinforming, and encouraging or discouraging the use of accurate or mistaken information or beliefs. Hochschild and Einstein show that if a well-informed electorate remains a crucial component of a successful democracy, the deliberate concealment of political facts poses its greatest threat.

Conventional wisdom and democratic theory hold that the best way to achieve controversial policy changes is in small, cautious steps and with participation of the various groups involved. Yet America's thirty years of experience with school desegregation shows this belief to be false. In this provocative new book, Jennifer Hochschild argues that when incremental and participatory methods are used to desegregate schools, both blacks and whites end up worse off-with little freedom and equality for blacks, much disruption and pain for both races, and few educational gains for anyone. However, school desegregation can succeed-for everyone-when rapid and extensive change is imposed by nonelected officials, at a centralized level, and without citizen involvement. Hochschild examines the record of school desegregation to show why this is so. She demonstrates, for example, that parental advisory groups have been ineffective or even harmful in designing new plans; that busing a few students short distances has been less effective than busing many students throughout a metropolitan area; that slowly phasing in desegregation increases white flight. More profoundly, she shows that racism is deeply embedded in our society and that whites may not be as willing to give it up as they think. Hochschild contends that we must choose between superficial "safe" changes that benefit a few at the expense of many and profound, deeply unpopular changes that in the long run will liberate most. That is the real American dilemma. "A comprehensive synthesis of what is known about the processes of school desegregation and a powerful policy-oriented argument on a subject whose crucial significance Americans have been unable to wish away." -Paul E. Peterson, Brookings Institution

Equality has always been the most powerful political idea in America, and it is becoming the most powerful idea in the world. Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to the most recent social critics have commented upon the idea's great force. Yet, for all its influence upon popular ideology, the idea of equality becomes a bundle of contradictory impulses once it is applied to public policy and social institutions. As the title of this lively book suggests, equality becomes equalities. Once inequality is established, there is a deep difference between equal policies and policies that lead to equality. Once people have different needs, there is a sharp difference between treating them equally and treating them in ways that serve them equally. Once people have unequal (or unequally developed) talents, then equal opportunity cannot mean both equal opportunity and an equal prospect of success. Once society is cleaved by differences of race, sex, income, and so on, there is an intense difference between policies and reforms that reduce racial, sexual, and economic inequality and policies that diminish equality among persons. Douglas Rae and his colleagues develop an ingenious "grammar of equality" to explain and explicate the main ways in which equality turns into equalities as it passes from the realm of ideas to the realm of practice. The book's exciting new method of analysis, based on logic and theories of political economy and political science, is a valuable contribution. Equalities helps us answer such questions as: "Is equality possible?" "How, after so long a period of ostensible egalitarianism, can inequality still dominate so much of the social landscape?" The responses are bound to stir controversy among all those interested in political theory or in social policy or in the attainment of equality.

The search for equality has been an enduring one in the United States. Yet there has been little significant change in the distribution of wealth over the generations, while the political ideology of socialism has been rejected outright by most people. In a sensitive rendering of data, Jennifer Hochschild discovers that it is the nonrich themselves who do not support the downward redistribution of wealth.

Using a long questionnaire and in-depth interviews, she examines the ideals and contemporary practices of Americans on the subject of distributive justice. She finds that both rich and poor Americans perceive three realms in their lives: the private, the political, and the economic. People tend to support equality in two of the realms: the private, where fundamental socialization takes place in the family, school, and neighborhood, and the political, where issues arise about taxes, private property, rights, political representation, social welfare policies, and visions of utopia. But in the economic realm of the workplace, class structure, and opportunity, Americans favor maintaining material differences among people.

Hochschild shows how divergence between ideals and practices, and especially between Americans' views of political and economic justice, produces ambivalence. Issues involving redistribution of wealth force people to think about whether they prefer political equalization or economic differentiation. Uncertain, Americans sometimes support equality, sometimes inequality, sometimes are torn between these two beliefs. As a result, they are often tense, helpless, or angry.

It is not often that Americans are allowed to talk so candidly and within rigorous socialscience sampling about their lives. Hochschild gives us a new combination of oral history and political theory that political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and policymakers can read with profit and pleasure.