Children at Risk of School Dropout

This chapter begins by outlining the routes through which children drop out of school. It then draws on the failings of the English system to suggest six key lessons for other jurisdictions. The first centers on how academic results–driven accountability measures push schools and decision-makers into unjustifiably excluding children. The second demonstrates the vulnerability of discretionary frameworks to perverse incentives and unintended negative consequences for children at risk of school dropout. The third highlights the difficulties created by increased autonomy for teachers and schools. The fourth reveals how additional protections for particularly vulnerable children are constrained by the broader exclusion regime. The fifth and sixth demonstrate the need for jurisdictions to revisit the conceptual and empirical basis of their legal frameworks for exclusion, whether grounded in best interests, competing interests, or children’s rights. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the need to develop empirical evidence to underpin decisions around dropout.

Race and the Adoption of Children

This chapter considers the role of race in the adoptive placement of children. In examining the law and policy issues, the chapter raises questions both about the role of race in American society and about the needs of children. These issues are reflected in the interplay in adoption law of two pivotal principles: the best interests of the child standard and the antidiscrimination principle. The best interests of the child standard is the guiding principle of child welfare law; the antidiscrimination principle has been incorporated into family law during the past half-century and disfavors decision making on the basis of race and certain other characteristics. Policy makers confront the challenge of how best to define each of these principles, and also how to balance or choose between them when they conflict. The chapter also identifies an apparent persistent gap in this realm between official policy and the daily practices of the social workers who orchestrate adoptions in the foster care system.

The Neurobiology of Childhood Psychosocial Adversity

This chapter begins by providing a basic overview of how the brain develops, starting with conception and continuing through adolescence. It emphasizes the experience-dependent nature of development and discusses how experience “cuts both ways.” Positive experiences can exert a healthy impact on development, whereas exposure to adverse experiences can have a deleterious impact on development. The chapter draws upon studies of both animals and humans. It pays particular attention to the range of adverse experiences that can selectively impact different aspects of brain and behavioral development, such as the effects of stress or neglect. The chapter then turns to how such experiences can become biologically embedded, leading to long-term changes in both biological and psychological development. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications such knowledge has for the law.

Children and the Law: An Introduction

This article introduces The Oxford Handbook of Children and the Law. This volume of collected essays by many of the world’s leading scholars of child welfare and law combines thorough research on a comprehensive range of legal issues salient in children’s lives with sophisticated theoretical and policy analysis of the law, informed by current empirical research on child development and welfare. The Handbook’s organization follows the life of a child, more or less chronologically, from prebirth to adolescence and a sequence of ever-widening social spheres—from the womb to family to society to the world. The topics range from assisted reproduction, protection of fetuses, parentage, child maltreatment, medical care, education, custody disputes, children’s privacy, delinquency, minimum age laws, and strategies for advocating for youths. There is also substantial geographic breadth; the authors of the volume’s chapters represent four continents and roughly a dozen countries. A unifying feature of the volume is that all chapters put children at the center of attention. The authors write about topics relating to children from within their respective areas of expertise and offer a perspective that focuses first and foremost on how the law impacts children’s wellbeing and experience of life. This often produces unfamiliar, thought-provoking conclusions.

Legislators Should Eliminate Religious Exemptions from Laws Protecting Children

The laws that protect children apply to everyone, religious and nonreligious. Too often, however, parents claim exemptions from child-protecting laws in the name of religious freedom beyond that which is required by the First Amendment. They refuse to vaccinate or to secure medical care for injury or illness, or they harm, abuse, or even kill their children, claiming they are doing so for protected religious reasons. This chapter argues that all children need full protection of the laws prohibiting abuse and neglect, and all parents must obey them. Children are no longer property; they are persons, and the laws that affect them should prevent harm, not cause it. Children’s health, safety, and well-being are rights that should be protected even against parents who harm them.

The Changing Landscape of Funding Public Elementary and Secondary Education in the United States

Funding of elementary and secondary education in the United States reflects a complex assortment of state constitutional mandates, federal laws, state statutes, and federal and state rules and regulations. The United States does not have a monolithic model of funding public schooling. In fact, in the past twenty years state legislatures have moved from the traditional public-school system to a model of funding three separate and distinct systems. These systems include the traditional system, a charter system, and a voucher system. The traditional system’s values are largely based on equity, fairness, and attempting to have a common set of educational experiences provided to all children on an equal footing. The charter system values innovation, experimentation, parental choice, and reduction of educational bureaucracy. The voucher system reflects values encompassing maximum parental choice, freedom of regulations, and individualism. Each system has its strengths and its weaknesses.

The Supreme Court Has Spoken

Two 2017 decisions of the United States Supreme Court could powerfully impact the education of students with disabilities. Frye v. Napoleon Community Schools (2017) addressed whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) entitled a student with physical disabilities to use a service dog in school. Endrew v. Douglas County School District (2017) addressed whether a child with autism was denied a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) within the meaning of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Taken together these cases underscore core principles in both statutes. The Endrew decision clarifies that the fundamental entitlement in IDEA of FAPE is a substantive one requiring schools to offer an individualized education plan (IEP) that is “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.” The Frye decision clarifies that the ADA applies to school-age children when discrimination, not FAPE, is at issue. The chapter cautions against over reliance on court decisions alone to improve educational opportunity for students with disabilities and proposes reforms that seek to improve the capacity of schools to provide improved educational opportunity for students with disabilities.

Addressing Childhood Trauma

Childhood exposure to violence, and resultant traumatic dysregulation pose immediate and long-term threats to individual development and to public health. Recognizing the phenomena and phases of children’s post-traumatic reactions following their exposure to violence has led to a clear roadmap for multidisciplinary and clinical interventions that most appropriately address children’s needs at each phase of post-traumatic reaction. A deeper understanding of childhood trauma and a greater appreciation of the value of early identification and intervention has also increased recognition of the value of multidisciplinary collaborative efforts in addressing the complex needs of traumatized children and families. Greater understanding of the roles that various professionals can play in helping children to recover from violent trauma has resulted in important innovations in law enforcement practice, pediatric health care, child welfare systems, and school systems. Similarly, a better understanding of childhood trauma has contributed to the development of an effective, evidence-based, early clinical intervention that can help to reduce immediate symptoms and the development of longer-term post-traumatic disorders, as well as to treatments that can interrupt the longer-term disorders that emerge when there is a failure of recovery from traumatic events.

The Promises and Pitfalls of Constitutionalizing Children’s Rights

In 2012, the Irish Constitution was amended by the insertion of a new provision focused on children’s rights. This amendment marked the culmination of a twenty-year campaign driven in large part by the opinion that the Constitution overemphasized the rights of parents and the family unit to the detriment of the rights of children. Campaigners hailed the outcome of the referendum as a historic day, but academic opinion has been more cautious about the true impact and potential of the final version. This article examines the lessons of the Irish experience by first exploring the reasons why children’s rights might be constitutionalized. It then examines the background to the Irish amendment, before drawing some conclusions on its impact and on what can be learned from the Irish experience on the value and limitations of constitutional change as a vehicle for advancing children’s rights.

Children and Juvenile Justice Law

Despite comprehensive international standards, children’s rights continue to be breached in juvenile justice systems around the world. This chapter suggests that conceptualizing children, autonomy, and—by extension—their rights as relational may improve rights protection for children who are in conflict with the law. It offers four justifications for a relational approach to juvenile justice—the descriptive, methodological, normative, and conceptual. The chapter then applies a relational framework to the specific context of juvenile justice rights in England and Wales and identifies three jurisprudential trends which, it suggests, indicate a partial shift by (some) courts towards a relational approach. However, there is still a considerable way to go before relationality goes beyond the superficial to become fully embedded as the basis for children’s rights in juvenile justice law. The chapter concludes by suggesting therefore, that as well as examining how the concept of autonomy is conceptualized in juvenile justice rights, we must also unpack and explore how the courts understand the concept of autonomy per se, if we are to achieve greater compliance with international rights standards.