Americans' perceptions of childhood disability have changed dramatically over the past century, as have their ideas about health and illness, medical developments, threats to children's health and development, and expectations for child functioning. Neal Halfon, Amy Houtrow, Kandyce Larson, and Paul Newacheck examine how these changes have…

Education is important for all children, but even more so for children with disabilities, whose social and economic opportunities may be limited. In this article, Laudan Aron and Pamela Loprest assess how well the nation's education system is serving students with disabilities. Aron and Loprest trace the evolution of the special education system…

Technological innovation is transforming the prevalence and functional impact of child disability, the scale of social disparities in child disability, and perhaps the essential meaning of disability in an increasingly technology-dominated world. In this article, Paul Wise investigates several specific facets of this transformation. He begins by…

Jeffrey Passel surveys demographic trends and projections in the U.S. youth population, with an emphasis on trends among immigrant youth. He traces shifts in the youth population over the past hundred years, examines population projections through 2050, and offers some observations about the likely impact of the immigrant youth population on…

The children from immigrant families in the United States make up a historically diverse population, and they are demonstrating just as much diversity in their experiences in the K-12 educational system. Robert Crosnoe and Ruth Lopez Turley summarize these K-12 patterns, paying special attention to differences in academic functioning across…

Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready explore the influences of the high school curriculum on student learning and the equitable distribution of that learning by race and socioeconomic status. They begin by tracing the historical development of the U.S. comprehensive high school and then examine the curricular reforms of the past three decades. During the…

Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth Vandewater review research on links between various types of electronic media and the cognitive skills of school-aged children and adolescents. One central finding of studies to date, they say, is that the content delivered by electronic media is far more influential than the media themselves. Most studies, they…

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills…

Tying teachers' pay to their classroom performance should, says Victor Lavy, improve the current educational system both by clarifying teaching goals and by attracting and retaining the most productive teachers. But implementing pay for performance poses many practical challenges, because measuring individual teachers' performance is difficult.…

Randall Eberts explores the role of teachers unions in public education. He focuses particularly on how collective bargaining agreements shape the delivery of educational services, how unions affect both student achievement and the cost of providing quality education, and how they support educational reform efforts. Eberts's synthesis of the…

As researchers continue to analyze the role of parenting both in the development of childhood overweight and in obesity prevention, studies of child nutrition and growth are detailing the ways in which parents affect their children's development of food- and activity-related behaviors. Ana Lindsay, Katarina Sussner, Juhee Kim, and Steven Gortmaker…

One of the most profound demographic shifts in the United States during the past two decades has been the dramatic increase in the Hispanic population, driven both by high birth rates relative to other racial and ethnic groups, and by immigration. The Hispanic population grew by 58% from 1990 to 2000, and in 2003 became the largest "minority"…