Carnegie council on children

Established in 1972 by the Carnegie Corporation as an independent commission to examine the needs of children in American society and to recommend changes in public policy regarding children and families. Kenneth Keniston was chairman and director of the Council.

From the description of Records, 1972-1980 (inclusive). (University of Chicago Library). WorldCat record id: 52250097

The Carnegie Council on Children had its origins in the Yale Faculty Study Group on Children organized in February, 1972 with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The Study Group was formed at the suggestion of Kenneth Keniston, a professor of psychology in the Yale Medical School whose books on youth and social change included The Uncommitted (1965), Young Radicals (1968), and Youth and Dissent (1971). In a series of eight meetings, Keniston and Study Group colleagues from the Yale faculty and staff explored the feasibility of creating a commission which would study the problems of children and recommend appropriate changes in public policy. In May, 1972, with the support of Alan Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation, and Barbara Finberg, a program officer with the foundation, Keniston announced to the Group that Carnegie had formally authorized funding for the Carnegie Council on Children. Between 1972 and 1979, cumulative Carnegie Corporation grants supporting the work of the Council amounted to $2,730,250.

The Council reflected the Carnegie Corporation's continuing encouragement of research in the psychological aspects of child development. Beginning in the mid-1960's, the foundation had supported a number of projects concerned with the study of child nurture and the application of cognitive theory to early childhood education. These projects included an international study of the care and education of young children at the University of Washington, a study of child welfare at the Brookings Institution, a project on alternative child rearing at the Center for Educational Policy Research, and a planning survey at the Brookline Early Education Project. None of these studies, however, had been intended to move beyond a specific problem to examine the broad effects of social, cultural, and physical settings on the emotional and intellectual growth of children. What distinguished the Carnegie Council on Children from previous Carnegie-funded projects was the sweeping nature of the mandate given it by the foundation: to "examine the current position of children in American society, identify the needs of children and parents, define and appraise how these needs are currently being met, recommend new policies, programs, and practices where they are needed, and specify how its recommendations would best be communicated and implemented."

Criteria for Council membership reflected the Corporation's determination to make the Carnegie Council on Children as broadly-based and influential as possible. Given the range of issues the Council would address, it was considered essential that members represent a variety of professional and disciplinary backgrounds. The organizers of the Council also wanted members to be young enough to provide fresh perspectives and be able to promote Council recommendations for decades after the release of its core report. All under fifty years of age, the final group of eleven selected by the Corporation included Keniston, who was named Chairman and Executive Director of the Council; John Demos, associate professor of history at Brandeis University; Robert J. Haggerty, professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester; Laura Nader, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley; Faustina Solis, associate professor of community medicine at the University of California at San Diego; Harold W. Watts, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin; Marion Wright Edelman, director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University; Patricia McGowan Wald, an attorney with the Mental Health Law Project in Washington, D.C.; Catherine Foster Alter, director of the Council on Children at Risk in Davenport, Iowa; Nancy Buckler, master teacher at the Loyola University Day School in Chicago; and Leo Molinaro, an urban planner and president of the American City Corporation of Columbia, Maryland. Two members left the Council before the completion of its work: Leo Molinaro, who resigned in 1975 and was replaced by William Kessen, professor of psychology at Yale University; and Patricia Wald, who resigned in 1977 to become Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Carnegie Council on Children met six to eight times annually from 1972 to 1977. Before each meeting, Council members received an agenda, schedule of sessions, and papers written by staff members in the Council's New Haven office or readings from other sources related to the topic to be discussed. Meetings were held in a number of cities in the United States and as far a field as Cuernavaca, Mexico. Meeting sites were determined by the location of relevant institutions or speakers; Cuernavaca, for example, was the site of an orphanage and a research group studying the effects of malnutrition on children.

The early months of the Council's deliberations were devoted to the search for an effective approach to the study of childhood in America. During an informal summer seminar held at New Haven in June and July of 1972, Keniston and several members of the Council staff reviewed current thinking about the nature of human development. Discussions at the seminar and others among the Council staff formed the basis for the selection of readings which guided the Council during its first meeting in Wellfleet, Massachusetts (September, 1972). Keniston noted at this meeting that, given the broad framework of the Corporation's mandate, the Council's first order of business would be to establish its own goals.

Accordingly, the Council decided at its second meeting in New Haven (November, 1972) to adopt nutrition as the focus for its initial investigations, considering it a subject limited enough for group discussion but pervasive enough in its implications to intersect with many related social issues. From November, 1972 to March, 1973, members of the Council's research staff developed a manuscript on nutrition incorporating the findings of numerous existing studies as well as comments and concerns raised by members during regular Council meetings. The completed draft on nutrition was presented to the Council at a meeting in New York (March, 1973), but no decision to endorse or publish it was reached. Concerned that the group's final report might be confined to a summary of existing literature, Keniston and other members suggested that the Council focus its efforts instead on the writing of six to ten critical studies of selected aspects of child development. This recommendation was elaborated in Keniston's Interim Report to the Council on May 15, 1973; future Council discussions, he suggested, should concentrate on a series of specific issues, with the Council staff enlarged to permit individual associates to develop the expertise necessary to produce original supporting research documents.

In the months after the issue of the Interim Report, the Council's research staff was expanded by the addition of John U. Ogbu, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley; K. Alison Clarke-Stewart, associate professor of education at the University of Chicago; Richard H. de Lone, vice president for research and development of the Corporation for Public/Private Ventures of Philadelphia; and Joan Costello, assistant professor of psychology at the Yale Child Study Center.

Other new staff members were hired to research specific topics such as the economics of childhood, the changing structure of relationships within the family, and the status of dependent and neglected children. By September, 1973, the size of the Council staff had doubled, and the work of the New Haven office had been reorganized into three general areas: broad social forces, supervised by Peter Almond, the Council's Associate Director; early child care, supervised by Joan Costello; and schooling, directed by Richard de Lone.

The influx of new staff members and the consequent proliferation of working papers made the Council's need for a central thematic focus increasingly apparent. During lengthy discussions at the New Haven office, Keniston and members of the Council staff had come to the conclusion that the family was the single most important factor in the social development of the child. Aided by position papers drafted by Clarke-Stewart, Costello, and other staff researchers (21:10), the full Council joined in the discussion of families at its meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas (January, 1974). These deliberations were continued at the Council's next meeting in Boston (March, 1974), and a consensus soon began to emerge on a number of significant points. Led by Keniston, the Council agreed that for the foreseeable future the nuclear family would remain the setting in which most children would continue to be raised, and that the aim of public policy should be to strengthen, not supplant, the family. To support the continued vitality of the American family, the Council endorsed a group of recommendations for full employment, minimum income support, universally available social services, and improved physical arrangements for living and working. Keniston, in a subsequent memorandum to the Council, suggested that the growing consensus on children and families be embodied in a series of six preliminary reports to be issued by the Council, followed by a final report containing specific public policy recommendations.

Keniston's memorandum also drew Council attention to the need for a "communications strategy" to promote the Council's ideas through television, films, print media, and extensive contacts with professional and lay groups concerned with children. His remarks were prompted by the Carnegie Corporation's creation of a new division of the Council in June, 1974: the Dissemination Unit, an office supervised by Peter Almond and supported with a special appropriation of $484,450 from the Corporation's annual grants to the Council. As described by Almond in his "Notes on Dissemination" (August, 1974), the Dissemination Unit would select a publisher for the Council's studies, formulate a policy for planning the Council's findings in the general news media, and prepare plans for other aspects of an effective public relations campaign.

By late 1974, Council members Haggerty, Kessen, Molinaro, Wald, and Watts had produced an outline for the final, or core, report of the Council. This outline served as the basis for a draft of the report written by Keniston and members of the staff during 1975 and presented to the Council for its criticism at a meeting in Boston in December, 1975. Simultaneously, drafts of supplementary reports on separate aspects of child development were being prepared by Ogbu, de Lone, Clarke-Stewart, and staff members John Gliedman and William Roth. These manuscripts, as well as Keniston's final draft of the core report, were discussed at two Council meetings in New York in July and November of 1976. Endorsed by the Council, the core report, titled All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure, was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in September, 1977. It was followed by four other Council publications issued by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich or its subsidiary, Academic Press: Child Care in the Family: A Review of Research and Some Propositions for Policy (1977) by Alison Clarke-Stewart; Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1978) by John U. Ogbu; Small Futures: Children, Inequality, and the Limits of Liberal Reform (1979) by Richard de Lone; and The Unexpected Minority: Handicapped Children in America (1980) by John Gliedman and William Roth.

The core report, All Our Children, addressed the problem of children in two stages. Part One, "Children and Families: Myth and Reality," attacked the notion of the self-sufficient American family by describing the pressures of family life, including changes in family structure, the increase in one-parent households, the growing number of working wives, the lack of adequate income, and the encroachments of television and other forms of modern technology. Part Two, "What Is To Be Done," outlined the Council's policy recommendations, in particular provisions for income support available to all, flexible work schedules, improved health care, and legal protection to safeguard the personal integrity of the child.

These proposals were supported by the distinctive contribution of each of the supplementary Council publications. Clarke-Stewart's Child Care in the Family aligned recent scholarly research on the subject of children with the requirements of government social policy, while Gliedman and Roth's The Unexpected Minority examined the cultural and legal difficulties confronting handicapped children. John Ogbu, in Minority Education and Caste, compared the situation confronting black children in America with caste structures abroad and argued that improved educational opportunities held out the only hope for breaking the cycle of racial disadvantage. Richard de Lone's Small Futures surveyed the achievements of white as well as black children with the intention of charting their degree of social mobility, and concluded that status was the single, invariable factor which controlled a child's future.

Taken together, All Our Children and the four background studies revealed two persistent concerns which had guided the Council's discussions: an interest in upward social mobility for all children, especially the handicapped, poor, and minorities; and a clear rejection of traditional bureaucratic programs and professional services in favor of a new approach to child care which would bring assistance to families in a more direct fashion. As Keniston told Adelina Diamond in an interview in December, 1978, "The Council moved away from direct government action and provision of free services to people toward a much more diffuse strategy....[Parents] are the best thing we have...we don't have any choice but to try to give the power and resources to parents." By turning away from state intervention in family life and endorsing a program of income redistribution through full employment and tax credits, the Council sought to place families at the center of public social welfare policy and thus guarantee the survival of a protective and supportive environment for American children.

The task of publicizing the Council's recommendations fell to the Dissemination Unit, the division established in New Haven in 1974 and transferred, along with all other editorial offices of the Council, to New York in 1975. While the full Council continued to meet until September, 1977, when All Our Children was published, the Dissemination Unit assumed many of its responsibilities while editing manuscripts, securing a publisher, issuing massive publicity mailings, and insuring adequate media coverage for the publication of each book.

In January, 1975, the Council began compiling a list of organizations to be contacted regarding the core report. This work was subsequently taken over by Christopher Cory, director for public relations in the Dissemination Unit. Correspondence was initiated with numerous associations, from the American Association of Psychiatric Services for Children to the World Council of Churches. Each association was alerted to the appearance of the forthcoming core report, sent copies of the published book, and then polled for reactions to the Council's recommendations. The office also functioned as a clearinghouse for work of all kinds on the needs of children. Among the groups expressing their indebtedness to the Council for ideas which helped shape their policies on children were the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, the 4-H, and the American Library Association.

Letters were also written to members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives to inform them of the Council's work. Virginia Fleming was retained as a consultant for this project, which resulted in Keniston's testimony before a joint committee of Congress in February, 1978. Keniston also appeared on the Today show, while reviews of All Our Children generated in part by Dissemination Unit publicity were published in major journals and newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.

The Dissemination Unit continued its work until 1980, when The Unexpected Minority was published. Some changes in staff occurred as the office completed its task, however. Christopher Cory, Peter Almond, and editor Jill Kneerim left their posts in 1978, but kept in touch with the project as members of an advisory board. Adelina Diamond replaced Cory as director of public relations to arrange publicity for the books yet to be completed. Cheryl Towers joined the staff in 1979, succeeding Katherine Toll as deputy director of public relations. Towers was soon given control of the entire office and the title managing director. She stayed with the Council until the Dissemination Unit offices were closed in July, 1979, but continued as an advisor to the Carnegie Corporation until the Unit's final report was issued in 1980.

From the guide to the Carnegie Council On Children. Records, 1972-1980, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)