News Clips

• Nov 14, 2009  |  SouthCoastToday.com Early Childhood Education is Economic Issue Partners in Early Childhood and Economic Development held a conference last week to discuss early education programs as an economic issue. Danielle Ewen, director of Child Care and Early Education at CLASP, said public and private partnerships are important and there is a need for better data about outcome, impact and providers in early child care.
• Nov 12, 2009  |  Mobile Press-Register Study Adjusts Poverty Rates "We really just wanted to provide this information to states to advance the dialogue on the need for a modern measure," said Dorothy Smith, a legal fellow at CLASP, referring to the CLASP report, Measure by Measure: the Current Poverty Measure v. the NAS Measures.
• Nov 11, 2009  |  McClatchy Newspapers Obama Urged to Turn Succesful State Job Program National As job losses continue to slow the nation's economic recovery, labor experts and economists are urging Congress and the Obama administration to boost funding for a little-known program that 17 states are using to avert layoffs and keep workers in their jobs. Neil Ridley, senior policy analyst at CLASP, said work sharing should be an option in every state, though it will not work for all employers.
• Nov 04, 2009  |  The Sacramento Bee California May Have the Nation's Highest Poverty Rate California has long had one of the nation's higher poverty rates, as calculated by the federal government for decades on a formula tied to food prices. But it may actually be the highest in the nation under one proposed new way of calculating it.
• Oct 01, 2009  |  Progress Illinois Legal Aid Safety Net Stretched Thin Across the United States there is a vast, unmet need for legal services for low-income Americans. The Legal Services Corporation recently released a report on what they call the "justice gap," the difference between need and available services. Their report shows that legal aid clinics turn down approximately half of potential low-income clients due to insufficient funds. Their findings are supported by research published this July by CLASP which suggest that less than 20 percent of the legal needs of the lowest-income Americans are currently being met.
• Sep 18, 2009  |  Education Week (subscription required) Early Education Issue Returns to Spotlight The recent release of the U.S. Census Bureau's statistics on poverty has highlighted the need for increased action on childhood poverty and early-education. Although progress is being made on these issues in some states and at the federal level, due to the current economic troubles, many states are only able to increase funding to one early-childhood program by making cuts to another, according to Danielle Ewen, the director of child care and early education at CLASP.
• Sep 13, 2009  |  Amarillo.com Poverty Level Rises in Region The U.S. Census Bureau released its annual poverty report last week. Included were some disturbing statistics, most notably the fact that the official U.S. poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent to 13.2 percent. "This report says that one of every eight of us was living in poverty last year. The story here is that for a very rich nation we start out with a high poverty rate," said CLASP deputy director, Jodie Levin-Epstein.
• Sep 09, 2009  |  The Kansas City Star The Flu is Coming to Work, too As another flu season approaches, and with it the added threat of a possible H1N1 epidemic, officials are concerned that current sick-day policies are only going to exacerbate the problem. In the current economic climate, many workers will come to work ill because they feel they cannot afford not to. One problem, according to CLASP, is that the majority of private-sector workers no longer have paid-sick days.
• Sep 02, 2009  |  Washington Employment Law Blawg Shared-Work Programs: A Little Used Alternative to Layoffs In today's economy, many employers are faced with the challenge of retaining their employees but reducing costs. According to CLASP, even if economic growth resumes, the job market is not likely to fully recover until mid-2010 or beyond. Shared-work programs offer employers an alternative to layoffs. These programs enable employers to reduce workers' hours while allowing these employees to retain their benefits and to be partially reimbursed for lost hours.
• Aug 24, 2009  |  Citylimits.org New Jobs Programs Aims for Unemployed 'Stimulus' Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, was more circumspect. "I think these programs are definitely helpful," Lower-Basch wrote in an e-mail. "But given the overall size of the local labor market, and the depth of the recession, I don't think anyone thinks these programs on their own are going to make a dent in the overall unemployment rate."
• Aug 21, 2009  |  The Economist The Recession May Have a Lasting Effect on Young People Young people always have lower levels of employment. They may forsake work to focus on their studies, hardly a bad thing, or be willing to wait for the right job. But they are also less experienced job hunters, less mobile, less skilled and often the first to be fired. Since 2000 they have had an especially hard time. The main federal effort to help the young, the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), has historically failed to reach many of the 3.5m-5m young people who are neither in school nor working. Linda Harris, director of Youth Policy at CLASP, would like a broad overhaul of WIA.
• Aug 12, 2009  |  Education Week (subscription required) Proposed College Loan Savings Would Aid Early Ed Congress is considering a significant new investment in early childhood education programs and school facilities, paid for by a major ... overhaul of the federal student-loan program. Danielle Ewen, director of Child Care and Early Education at CLASP, called the measure "a great first step."
• Aug 02, 2009  |  The Omaha World Herald Job Program Aimed at Youth The purpose of summer jobs programs is not to take the kid who has it all together, but to prepare the kid who hasn't got it all together yet so that, as a result of this experience, they will have learned something and are able to be a more functional, productive member of society. -- Rhonda Tsoi-A-Fatt, senior policy analyst, CLASP.
• Jul 27, 2009  |  Associated Press Colorado Task Force Looks For Ways To Reduce Poverty Jodie Levin-Epstein, deputy director of CLASP, told lawmakers that Colorado is one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to dealing with poverty. She said people who are trying to get out of poverty are stymied by poverty measures that are based on life in the past century, when moms stayed at home and husbands were the breadwinner. She said lawmakers have failed to take into account the cost of health care, transportation and tax policies that make it difficult for families to escape poverty.
• Jul 26, 2009  |  Worcester Telegram Companies And The State Team Up For A Surprising Payroll Plan Work sharing, sometimes also known as short-time compensation, has long been used in Europe. California established a work sharing program in 1978. A temporary national program began in 1982, followed by permanent changes to federal laws in 1992 that allow work sharing, according to CLASP.
• Jul 26, 2009  |  The Washington Post D.C. Weighs Welfare Cut As Budget Gap Looms Some experts say that after the changes that began in the 1990s, there aren't many easy cases left among welfare recipients. "Most of the people who could work have been working and aren't anywhere near the welfare office at this point," said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst for CLASP.
• Jul 17, 2009  |  Philadelphia Business Journal N.J. Bill Would Help Workers Whose Hours Are Shortened Currently, 17 states participate in work share programs. With the state of the economy it's likely other states will begin offering them in the future, said Neil Ridley, senior policy analyst at CLASP.
• Jun 26, 2009  |  Huffington Post Michigan: Surging Unemployment Shrinking Safety Net For the last 12 years state welfare agencies have seen it as their goal to discourage people from receiving welfare assistance, said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst with CLASP. She called Michigan a "worrying" case and said that although welfare rolls are increasing in other states, "the percentages are still low."
• Jun 17, 2009  |  Inside Higher Education Getting To The Finish Line The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced more than $6.4 million in grants to national policy organizations for efforts to identify why so many young Americans drop out of college. The grants include $1.5 million for CLASP.
• Jun 16, 2009  |  Education Week (subscription required) Preschool Programs Tread Thin Budget Ice While some funding streams are holding steady, states are cutting other funding sources, such as state child care subsidies, that are used to pay for full-day, full-year preschool programs, said Danielle Ewen, director of Child Care and Early Education at CLASP.