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Executive Summary
Pages 1-12

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From page 1...
... Summary Americans are concerned, even alarmed, by the apparent increase in the numbers of adolescents who engage in high-risk behaviors behaviors that compromise their health, endanger their lives, and limit their chances to achieve successful adult lives. Adolescence is a natural period of experimentation and risk taking, but some young people whether poor, mic36le class, or rich appear far more likely than others to adopt "risky life-styTes," life-styTes characterized by drug use, unprotected sexual behavior, dropping out of school, clelinquency, and violence.
From page 2...
... As the fault lines widen, increasing numbers of youths are falling into the juvenile justice system, the child welfare system, and other even more problematic settings. This report attempts to improve understanding of the forces tearing apart the critical institutions in the lives of adolescents, as a first step in developing a viable plan to strengthen them.
From page 3...
... The combination of financial insecurity for an increasing proportion of families, increased work effort by parents seeking to maintain their living standard, and the demographic changes that have so dramatically increased the number of children and adolescents living in single-parent households result in increasing num ~.
From page 4...
... Yet the child welfare system has not been successful in providing mental health services for foster care children. No one in the child welfare field holds any illusions that the system is currently able to provide adequate resources to promote adolescent development or that it has been able to do so for the past decade.
From page 5...
... The growth in crack and cocaine markets since the early 1980s has placed additional stress on poor neighborhoods. The highly visible, lucrative, and violent drug markets have simultaneously
From page 6...
... The adolescent health and mental health care system lacks all of the essential elements of primary care: a consistent entry point into the system, a locus of ongoing responsibility, adequate backup for consultation and referral services by specialists on adolescence, and comprehensiveness. As a result, the health care system is poorly set up to help adolescents overcome problems resulting from poverty, dangerous neighborhoods, and an inadequate social environment including school and home.
From page 7...
... Because of residential stratification, most of these adolescents attend schools with the fewest material resources. In 1991, for example, per pupil expenditures in the 47 largest urban school districts averaged $5,200; in suburban districts, the figure was $6,073.
From page 8...
... in Tower tracks rarely move into higher tracks: the inferior quality of instruction and learning environments In the tower tracks is one major reason that students seldom move from Tower tracks into more advanced programs. In ac3clition, instruction in the Tower tracks emphasizes basic skills rather than higher order learning, effectively sorting students' future educational and career options.
From page 9...
... These systems assume major roles in the lives of many adolescents, especially the adolescent children of racial and ethnic minorities and the inner-city poor. Economic and residential stratification in the United States concentrates crime, particularly violent crime, in Tow-income, urban neighborhoods.
From page 10...
... Both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems are generally failing in their efforts to rehabilitate adolescent offenders {an increasing number of whom are now consigned to the aclult justice system because of participation in drug-related homicides and other particularly violent crimes)
From page 11...
... Although individual programs have shown impressive results and have provided a life raft for some adolescents, they are not a substitute for fundamental improvements in the major settings that are the framework of adolescent life. Those primary settings are crucial, and the first priority must be to strengthen them.
From page 12...
... ~ ~ ~ , ~ O O The demographic changes that are creating large numbers of poor, single-parent families are not well understood, and it is not at all clear what effect specific changes in public policies might have on those trends. Therefore, we have limited ourselves to describing the broad changes that we believe are essential if settings are to become less dangerous for a large proportion of American adolescents and to describing research priorities to improve understanding of the particular policies and programs that might be effective in changing these settings.


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