This toolkit released by Heartland Alliance, National Initiatives on Poverty and Economic Opportunity includes briefs and resources relating to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). The resources provide stakeholders with recommendations for ensuring that the workforce system will increase employment and opportunity for jobseekers.

This document presents the proceedings from “A Working Meeting on Recent School Readiness Research: Guiding the Synthesis of Early Childhood Research,” which was held on October 21-22, 2008 in Washington, D.C. The meeting was sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) and the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Abt Associates Inc. and the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) convened the meeting.

The purposes of the meeting were to:

• Synthesize findings about impacts on children’s school readiness outcomes and teachers’ behavior emerging from a set of federally funded studies of early childhood programs, practices, interventions and curricula;and integrate new results with findings from previous research.
• Bring together early childhood research and policy experts to examine and evaluate the state of our knowledge about how to support the early development of young children, particularly those who are at-risk for poor outcomes because of poverty, and take stock of progress being made to understand how to narrow the school readiness gap. (author abstract)

The career pathways approach can improve fragmented and broken educational pipelines. The approach links education and training services to help students advance to higher levels of education and employment in a given sector. The career pathways framework combines adult education, training, and postsecondary programs and connects those with employers’ needs. This toolkit, developed by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), is intended to help interagency state teams identify and use federal resources to support career pathways models. It also includes summaries of various federal programs that may strengthen states’ career pathways initiatives by providing more ways to obtain support services for students.

The National Mentoring Partnership (MENTOR) recently released the fourth edition of Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, which includes a collection of research-informed practices for creating and sustaining quality youth mentoring programs. The report covers six core standards of practice: recruitment, screening, training, matching and initiating, monitoring and support, and closure. Each standard includes benchmarks and enhancements, as well as recommendations for program planning and management. In addition to Elements, MENTOR provides other resources, including a toolkit and a series of webinars, to help implement mentoring programs.

This issue of The Future of Children focuses on U.S. child health policy. The articles within the publication present findings such as: a wide range of policies from mental health to family interventions can affect children’s health, child health is generally approached with a crisis-response mentality, limited data exists on cost-effectiveness of child health services, poor and minority children are at the highest risk for health problems, and responsibility for child health is fragmented between families and the various levels of government.