Finding policy solutions to childhood problems

By Jennifer Chorpening
Reprinted from the Durham Herald-Sun, 1-10-00.

Kenneth Dodge's construction job doesn't deal with bricks and mortar. Instead, he hammers out intangibles - mission, organization and direction - for Duke University's new Center for Child and Family Policy. It's Duke's way of building bridges between research on child development and actual child policy, so that both inform the other.

Without communication between these two sides, laws get passed that lack any scientific grounding, and scientists dither on research that is irrelevant to contemporary society, Dodge said.

Dodge, a Duke professor and child clinical psychologist, has already had a long career studying why some children turn aggressive and violent. He's worked on national studies that ask whether intervention and mentoring can turn at-risk kids into model youths.

And now he's directing the newly formed center at Duke's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, "to contribute to solutions to important problems affecting today's children, and their families, through an integrated system of scientific research, debate and dissemination, public service and teaching."

The center, which started July 1, has already attracted interest from more than 40 faculty members across the spectrum of Duke departments. Research through the center has begun on several fronts, including studies on how to stop school violence in Durham Public Schools and how to better prepare children for kindergarten. Other faculty are studying the economic impacts of educational policies, such as paying bonuses to schools for improved scores on standardized tests.

David Rabiner, a child clinical psychologist with the center, said the mission is to "really try to work toward translating the kind of research that often goes on in academic settings to real-world applications that can have a meaningful impact on children and families."

When disconnects between research and policy occur, the nation gets programs that may not work, leaving taxpayers griping and children in the lurch. For example, communities and schools often want to isolate deviant children and adolescents in special classes, but child psychologists frown on this practice, Dodge said.

Dodge admits that, at times, researchers just weren't working on the kinds of projects that would have better informed public policy. Now, only after state after state has required performance tests of students are researchers studying whether some subjects get shortchanged in the race to make sure Tommy and Jane can read by the fourth grade.

But that's where the center will come in, to play catch-up with some research, and to lead the way, both locally and nationally, with new studies. The mission statement cites the proximity to Raleigh as helpful in increasing lobbying and educational efforts when the laws are written.

Helen Ladd, a public policy and economics professor who works closely with the center, said officials there are negotiating with those at the N.C. Department of Public Instruction to do special research projects with state data on many topics, including educational accountability and financing issues.

Ladd specializes in research on education, from accountability for educational outcomes - providing financial incentives to schools that do well on tests and sanctioning those that don't - to school choice and other issues of equity and adequacy.

"We'd like to have this center work with North Carolina data and North Carolina educational policymakers to see how we can develop some research projects," she said. This research may be directed to helping disadvantaged students achieve, or to reducing the black/white test score gap, she added.

As for why it was important for the center to start at Duke now, Ladd said there is a lot of interest in this state and around the country on the condition of children.

"And that's brought on for lots of reasons. In part, the welfare changes have reduced the safety net for some low-income children. There are greater disparities in wealth - the wealthy are getting wealthier and the poor are getting poorer. Changes in the economy, an emphasis on a knowledge-based economy, make it absolutely critical for all individuals to get a good education," she said.

Duke administrators knew they had a strong psychology department, and they knew they had a top-notch public policy institute. The trouble was getting the two together, Dodge said, so that both sides could inform and strengthen each other.

"Children's policy will hopefully become a growing emphasis university-wide," Dodge said. Indeed, the center plans to not only do research, but to take charge in Duke's mentoring programs at Durham schools to make undergraduate volunteering efforts more effective.

Besides Dodge and Rabiner, researchers include John Coie, Duke psychology professor and Dodge's former adviser. They all also keep busy working on the 10-year Fast Track program, which Dodge and Coie co-founded. The project is the largest experiment on child conduct disorder prevention ever funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health.

In this study, 900 high-risk children from four areas across the nation - Durham; Nashville, Tenn.; Seattle; and rural areas in Pennsylvania - were divided into two groups. One was simply observed over time, but the other received intensive intervention, mentoring and tutoring. Now that those children are entering middle school, researchers have shown that the mentored children are less likely to need placement in special education, Dodge said.

Career criminals may cost taxpayers about $ 2 million each, through incarceration, mental health programs and other treatment, Dodge said. The Fast Track program costs about $ 40,000 a child. The Center for Child and Family Policy has been given $ 100,000 to do part of the cost-benefit analysis of the program, to see whether it's cost effective to provide preventive mental health medicine to the nation's youths.

"We like to think about it in a public health way," Dodge said. "Pay now or pay later."

The center operates out of both Dodge's second-floor office in Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the red-brick Old Mill Building on Ninth Street. The researchers wanted to be located near campus but off it, so that community members would feel more comfortable visiting, Dodge said.

Dodge has always been interested in understanding how things work scientifically, he said. "I like to figure out solutions to problems. That's fun. I don't know where I got that interest." But he also wanted to make an impact and saw that he could through child psychology.

"My interest in violence among children probably arose from growing up on the south side of Chicago, where violence was common," he said. "I was personally spared, but others around me were not."

Dodge went on to graduate with honors from Northwestern University, then earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke in the 1970s. After he spent more than a decade working on a prominent scholarship at Vanderbilt University, Duke officials lured him back to the area with this directorship, which started last January.

It also helped that his wife, Claudia Jones, grew up in Durham, earned undergraduate and medical school degrees from Duke and still has family in the area. She works as an assistant clinical professor of pathology at the Duke University Medical Center.

Child and family policy, and most especially, education policy, has gained particular national prominence, Dodge said. All those who want to run for U.S. president these days have to have something to say about education, whether they talk about school choice, school violence or standardized testing. In North Carolina, one of the projects Gov. Jim Hunt is proudest of has to do with improving preschool programs, Dodge said.

Dodge expects the center to do research on preschools and daycare centers, which will face increased public scrutiny - and increased public policy proposals - in the coming years as more children enter the system because both parents work, he said.

"Now that most children go to out-of-the-home daycare, we haven't caught up with how to plan it. Who owns daycare and preschool?" he asked.

Who licenses daycare? Who plans the curriculum? Is daycare just a place to keep children busy or one in which to start a child's education? Dodge said he is looking forward to finding the answers and to facilitating work between scholarly researchers and community teachers.

"It takes cultivating a relationship. Too often, ivory tower researchers told the community what to do and nobody listened," he said. Researchers have special skills and knowledge, as do community people - and both are needed, he said.