Recent years have brought a series of rapid changes to New York City’s subsidized early education system. There was the massive EarlyLearn reform of 2012, pre-K expansion in 2014, and now the Department of Education's rollout of preschool for 3-year-olds as it prepares to take over responsibility for all City-contracted child care services. In this shifting landscape, trends in enrollment can provide a window into how parents and providers are experiencing the changes. Using point-in-time data obtained by CNYCA, we have identified five key enrollment trends in New York City’s subsidized child care system.
New Publication | Urban Matters
Summer Reading: Understanding - and Overcoming - Slavery's Long Legacy of Inequality
Summer reading is mostly supposed to be light books that go with beaches and barbeques. Mindy Fullilove is recommending three books that, while not light, will have the paradoxical effect of making you feel better about these difficult times
New Report
Building Health Homes for Kids: New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape
By Abigail Kramer
New York has begun its ambitious project to re-engineer health care for low-income children. In a new report, Building Health Homes for Kids: New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape, the Center for New York City Affairs looks at the opportunities and challenges presented by the State’s first major step toward reform.
NEW report
The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools
By Nicole Mader, Clara Hemphill, and Qasim Abbas
The conventional wisdom is that most elementary school children in New York City attend their zoned neighborhood schools and that the city’s high levels of school segregation merely reflect segregated housing patterns. But a more nuanced and in some ways disquieting story emerges from our analysis presented in a new policy report from the Center for New York City Affairs, “The Paradox of Choice.”
new report | CHILDREN, YOUTH & FAMILIES | REPORTS
Small Children, Big Opportunities
The Department of Education Will Soon Take Charge of Child Care for Babies and Toddlers. What Can They Do to Build Capacity and Improve Quality?
The last in a series of briefs looking at child care for babies and toddlers in New York City's subsidized early education centers, this report presents our key findings. It also provides recommendations for building the centers’ capacity to provide quality infant and toddler care. With the City preparing to move its subsidized child care system from its current home at the Administration for Children’s Services to the City’s Department of Education, our advisory board of early education stakeholders, argues that now is the time to dream big when it comes to babies and toddlers, and to build a rich continuum of early education from infancy onward that will prevent the need for more costly interventions down the line.
NEW REPORT | CHILDREN, YOUTH & FAMILIES | REPORTS
Making Room for Babies?: Lessons for the Field
By Kendra Hurley
Many child care centers have seen their enrollment of 4-year-olds decline due to New York City's pre-K expansion, which has dramatically grown the number of early education options available to kids this age. In response, some centers have become interested in “aging down” to serve younger children. This would be a tremendous boon in New York City, where quality affordable and subsidized infant and toddler care is in high demand and short supply. However, "aging down" is difficult. This report looks at ways that affordable and subsidized centers who do provide infant care make it work.
New Report | Child Welfare Watch
Keeping Teenagers out of Foster Care: Do Teen-Specialized Services Make a Difference?
By Abigail Kramer
In 2013, New York City launched an array of programs designed to keep teenagers out of the City’s foster care system.
The programs—known collectively as “teen-specialized preventive services”—represent a pivotal piece of the City’s ongoing child welfare reform agenda: to keep whittling down the number of kids who enter foster care by providing intensive, evidence-based therapy to families in crisis.
Data & Statistics | Child WelFare Watch
Watching the Numbers
Our six years of key indicators spotlight trends in New York City’s foster care and preventive services systems.
Full Survey
New Release
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 4 on How Businesses are Adapting to the Increasing Minimum Wage
By James Parrott
CNYCA partners with the Workforce Field Building Hub, an initiative of the NYC-based Workforce Professionals Training Institute (WPTI) on the Monitoring the Minimum Wage issue brief series. The briefs are intended to track the implementation of the $15 minimum wage in New York City by engaging businesses, workers and workforce practitioners, and by assessing the impacts in other jurisdictions around the country.
Monitoring the Minimum Wage: Brief 4 on lessons from other cities is available here.
Previous issues in the series are available here.
After a series of widely publicized child deaths in 2016, New York City's child welfare system continues to struggle under a glut of new cases.
In response to a surge in child abuse and neglect reports, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has drastically increased the number of families it brings into the system, filing more cases in Family Court and placing more children in foster care.
But the resulting system-overload, they say, increases the risk of breaking up families unnecessarily, and may make children less safe.
NEW INITIATIVE
Across the city, social service agencies are increasingly employing staff who’ve themselves had run-ins with the law as “Credible Messengers” to other court-involved youth. It’s a recognition of the powerful positive impact mentors who’ve had similar life experiences can have in changing young lives.
To foster this important work, the Center for New York City Affairs is pleased to announce the launch of the Institute for Transformative Mentoring (ITM). ITM is a training program focused on the professional and personal development of such Credible Messengers. It’s a semester-long course, developed with Credible Messengers and the help of training and education experts and foundation and non-profit leaders, that’s designed to enhance the practical skills of Credible Messengers and also further the healing of their own lives. ITM will support the work of this unique and growing workforce.
For more information, click here.
New Publication | Urban Matters
The Flawed Specialized High School System – And Ways to Fix It
By Clara Hemphill
Mayor Bill de Blasio faces an uphill battle in Albany in his quest to get rid of the admissions test for elite high schools including Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science, but there’s a lot he can do now to advance his Administration’s stated goal of increasing opportunities for talented black and Latino kids—without the approval of the State Legislature.
Urban Matters
There Are Reasons for Hope In Integrating New York Public Schools
By Clara Hemphill
In the mostly pessimistic debate over school segregation here’s a reason for optimism: For the first time in decades, we have the possibility — if not yet the reality — of more economically, and also racially, integrated public schools in many neighborhoods in New York City. And there are heartening examples at the grassroots level of parents and school principals working toward that goal.
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"A new report by the Center for New York City Affairs finds that more than half of African-American families citywi… https://t.co/iIEwF0VNso
View the ITM Documentary
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