We are delighted to highlight three poverty researchers in this
issue, two of whom will be giving talks at the Center this
spring. Please join us for those upcoming events! We are also
very pleased to include a profile of our own faculty affiliate,
Michal Kurlaender, whose career exemplifies the combination of
high impact research, dissemination, and outreach that the Center
strives for. In other news, we have updated our website. Take a
few minutes to explore our new site and see what
the Center has to offer.
Intensified violence and poverty in the Northern Triangle
countries of Central America have spurred migration[1] among
youth who seek to either reunite with family or to support
families who remain abroad. Policies to protect these youth would
promote their holistic integration into U.S. society, enforce
safety and well-being along the U.S. southern border and help
strengthen the youths’ countries of origin socially, economically
and politically.
In the classroom at Kit Carson Middle School in Sacramento,
Michal Kurlaender sits at one of four small desks pushed to face
each other. The walls are papered in yellow, red and bright blue,
and wavy corrugated borders frame a flutter of papers under the
banner “AMAZING.”
Kurlaender is interviewing a teacher as part of her evaluation of
the school’s teacher development program to improve students’
college readiness skills. The sudden, grating buzz of the class
bell startles everyone. Kurlaender smiles. “It’s nicer when it’s
the music instead,” she says.
In this podcast, Harry Holzer and Center Director Ann Stevens
discuss how colleges have taken on the role of building the U.S.
labor force. In March, 2015, Holzer visited the center as a
Visiting Scholar to present the seminar “Building Labor Market
Skills among Disadvantaged Americans.”
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality co-organized “A
Blueprint for Ending Poverty … Permanently” with
the Mazatlán
Forum in March. National Poverty Center Directors David
Grusky, Lonnie Berger, and Ann Stevens met with some of the best
scholars of poverty to develop and share a set of concrete
proposals that go beyond the usual narrow-gauge interventions and
take on the ambitious goal of actually ending poverty.
