“The education to work transition of young people is key to a successful work-life and to fight youth unemployment. The book provides an impressive outline of the facts and convincing insights of the potential causes. This offers a large and broader audience help to adjust properly to achieve a better life.” Klaus F. Zimmermann, IZA, Bonn, Germany This work points to the youth experience gap as a key concept to explain the meager employment opportunities and earnings many young people face.The transition from education to work remains a long dark tunnel around the world. However, this book shows that there are striking differences between countries: in Germany, the young people of today are no worse off than their adult counterparts, while in Southern European and Eastern European countries they fare 3 through 4 times worse. The current economic and financial crisis has further exacerbated the situation for young people in many advanced economies. Observers are divided as to the optimal design of youth employment policy. Liberalists believe that the market itself should address youth disadvantages. More flexible labor markets should also guarantee greater labor turnover, including temporary work, so as to allow young people to move from one job to the next until they accumulate the work experience they need to become more employable and find the right career. In contrast, other economists oppose approaches focusing on entry flexibility and temporary work, claiming that the former type helps only the most skilled and motivated target groups, while the latter only allows young people to gather generic, not job-specific work experience.

How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities. Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James describes the nature of their thinking about privacy, property, and participation online. She identifies three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people he knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from “what's theirs is theirs” to “free for all”; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is “just a joke”; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions.

Surveys the history of youth unemployment and identifies key issues underlying the current crisis. The Youth Unemployment Crisis: A Reference Handbook examines the recent phenomenon in the United States wherein young workers ages 16 to 24 are unemployed or disconnected from the labor force at disproportionate rates. It describes in detail what led to the crisis, who it affects, and what can be and is being done about it. The book opens with a chapter that addresses the nature and scope of the crisis, which is followed by a discussion of the inherent problems, controversies, and possible solutions. It includes essays from a diverse range of contributors, providing useful perspectives to round out the author's expertise, as well as a collection of data and documents; an overview of important people, organizations, and resources relating to the crisis; a chronology listing important events in the youth unemployment timeline; and a glossary of key terms.

This influential book describes the knowledge and skills teachers and school administrators need to recognize and combat bias and inequity that undermine educational engagement for students experiencing poverty. Featuring important revisions based on newly available research and lessons from the authors professional development work, this Second Edition includes: a new chapter outlining the dangers of grit and deficit perspectives as responses to educational disparities; three updated chapters of research-informed, on-the-ground strategies for teaching and leading with equity literacy; and expanded lists of resources and readings to support transformative equity work in high-poverty and mixed-class schools. Written with an engaging, conversational style that makes complex concepts accessible, this book will help readers learn how to recognize and respond to even the subtlest inequities in their classrooms, schools, and districts.

That complements the college-application process, communicating with students about their goals, and handling logistics such as travel, health insurance, and money.

In a changing world that demands new skills, a vital concern of public education is the gap in academic performance between low- and high-achieving students. There is no excuse for the achievement gaps that persist among poor and minority students in schools today. All students can succeed at high levels, regardless of race, ethnicity and economic background. Several countries have successfully confronted inequities in achievement, demonstrating that any school can close achievement gaps regardless of the community they serve, and that all students can achieve at high levels when they are provided with the right opportunities. This book is about understanding what factors selected countries have applied to promote progress and what factors contribute to progress in the closing of achievement gaps. It is about creating opportunities for all students. Closing the Achievement Gap from an International Perspective: Transforming STEM for Effective Education is written in response to rising concern for the improvement of quality education – especially in mathematics and science – provided to all students. The contributors take a systematic view of the subject, beginning with a cross-national analysis of teacher qualifications and the achievement gap that spans 50 countries. The content of the book is organized in sections describing education around the globe: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Individual chapters offer close-up analysis of efforts to close achievement gaps in the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, England, Turkey, China, South Africa and Australia among many others. The contributors provide information on the achievement gap in mathematics and science, review current research, and present strategies for fostering improvement and raising performance with a focus on school-related variables that adversely affect educational outcomes among poor and minority students. The authors of the various chapters looked at how students’ data correlated with classroom practices, teacher instruction and academic programming, as part of their efforts to measure student growth. Qualitative and quantitative data are provided to provide evidence not only of the problem, but also for the solution. The book concludes with a chapter on promoting equality and equity to shrink the achievement gap worldwide.

This book explores how the youth experience, viscerally felt and deeply ingrained at a time of substantial physical, psychological and emotional changes, serves to authenticate that youth experience to the exclusion of that of ensuing youth generations. Using Cohen’s concept of moral panic to frame the intergenerational conflict, notions of generational exclusivity and authenticity are explored through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – how each generation privileges its own youth experience as the ‘standard’ by which other youth generations can be judged. Shared authenticated ‘generational understandings’ act as the benchmark by which ensuing youth generations can be assessed and found wanting. Intergenerational conflict has been brought into sharp focus by the emergence of the Millennial generation, digital natives, with their obsession with digital technology and particularly mobile phones. The book will be of interest for the field of youth studies in general, particularly upper-level undergraduate youth studies courses and postgrads and social scientists. In addition, it will be of interest for scholars interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Stanley Cohen and subject areas: intergenerational conflict, social change, popular culture, music, media and cultural studies, and social theory.

Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.

The recent recession has led to an ongoing crisis in the youth labour market in Europe. This timely book deals with a number of areas related to the context, choices and experiences of young people, the consequences of which resonate throughout their lives. The focus of the contributions to this volume is on issues which, whilst undoubtedly important, have thus far received less attention than they arguably deserve. The first part of the book is concerned with issues related to education and training, covering matters such as the role of monopsony in training, the consequences of over-education, and the quality of educational institutions from primary to tertiary. The second part is primarily concerned with the long-term consequences of short-term choices and experiences including contributions on health-related choices, health consequences later in life, factors affecting the home-leaving decision, as well as an analysis of the increasing intergenerational transmission of inequality; a trend which accelerated during the recession. The last part of the book deals with issues related to youth unemployment and NEET – the direct consequence of the recession. This book contains a number of innovative analyses reporting significant findings that contrast with standard models. Some of the more interesting results directly contradict conventional wisdom on a number of topics from the importance of monopsony in training markets to the importance of transitory income changes on consumption of addictive goods. This book is suitable for those who study labor economics, political economy as well as employment and unemployment.