This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a school's receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the…

This paper critically examines the development of food charity in schools in England. Growing numbers of schools, often in partnership with charities and businesses, are directly providing food to parents who are struggling to feed their families. This paper analyses how and why this is happening and its broader significance. The growth of food…

This article investigates stakeholders' learning and transformative action when developing a collaboration platform between a Swedish regional authority organisation (RAO) and civil society organisations (CSOs) to find new ways to provide welfare services. The material is based on 22 semi-structured interviews and observations of seven general…

Although food insecurity is common among college students, they face significant barriers in accessing food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Despite being a proven program designed to ameliorate food insecurity, eligibility requirements and student-specific restrictions have prevented many eligible students…

As roughly 7.3 million students in rural school districts head back to school this fall, they remain largely unaware that the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 Farm Bill) is due to expire on September 30, 2024 (Hartman et al., 2023). Enacted on December 20, 2018, and temporarily renewed in September 2023, this critical piece of legislation…

Background: Anti-welfare narratives depict welfare systems as overly-permissive, open to fraud, and fundamentally unfair. Countering these supposed ills have been political appeals to evidence and reforms made to disability benefit assessments under the banner of objectivity. But objectivity is a complex construct, which entails philosophical and…

In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into indirect and direct effects, examples of post-treatment confounding are abundant. In the presence of treatment-by-mediator interactions, past research has generally considered it infeasible to adjust for a post-treatment confounder of the mediator-outcome relationship due…

This article explores the Nordic denial of colonial involvement and complicity and the way it operates in welfare work with refugees in Denmark. Deploying a postcolonial welfare analytics that puts welfare work in a context of colonially social, economic, and cultural relations, the article develops a methodology of composing narratives, based on…

This paper explores modes of expectation among care-experienced young people when navigating educational success. Luhmann's theoretical framework is used to conceptualise experiences of educational success and the role of uncertainty. We identify three modes of expectation: trust, risk and danger. To illustrate these modes, we draw on selected…

New Zealand National Party's 2022-2023 policy of Social Investment, which if adopted, will legitimise the management of young unemployed in the name of correcting and helping them. Zygmunt Bauman's (1989) concept of 'rational bureaucratic culture' is used to examine the aims to bring the 'abnormal' citizen into the tax-paying fold. The policy will…

Government agencies collect vast amounts of administrative data in their day-to-day activities, primarily for program operations. But the information is less often used as a research tool or fully harnessed for its evidence-building potential. This brief is the fourth in a series of publications from MDRC about the Temporary Assistance for Needy…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows high-poverty schools to offer free meals to all students regardless of household income. Conceptualizing universal meal provision as a strategy to alleviate stigma associated with school meals, we hypothesize that CEP implementation reduces the incidence of suspensions, particularly for students…

This short take presents the process of a learning circle, underpinned by Dadirri (Ungunmeer-Baumann 1988). This method was used for the purposes of critical reflective practice and data collection activity with non-Indigenous participants. Dadirri is a First Nations (Australian) term for "deep listening." The learning circle research…

In 2022, the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Project SPARC conducted research to better understand the barriers experienced by parenting students participating in CalWORKs, California's cash assistance program for families with children. This brief highlights findings from the research on parenting students' experiences with housing.

Childhood marginalization is the result of complicated processes that appears difficult to address for policymakers worldwide. Neo-institutional theory enables studies of the complexity of educational organizations, showing how they evolve in responses to their contradictory surroundings and generate unintended social inequality. Three Nordic…