The United States should provide all young people entering the work force with opportunities to develop productive careers. Despite that fact, the nation's schools fail to equip many young people with appropriate skills, the job market often fails to link them to long-term advancement-oriented employment, and their communities often provide few role models of adult employment success. These problems are particularly acute in the nation's inner cities. The following are among the actions that communities, schools, and employers can take to create a more favorable environment and employment in inner cities: provide prenatal/postnatal health care, parenting education, developmentally oriented preschool programs, and health/social services for students and their families; initiate gun and drug control measures; establish higher educational standards; improve teacher quality; increase schools' use of information technology; strengthen school-based management; expand charter schools and public school choice; increase employee recruiting through inner city schools and other community-based sources of job referrals; provide student internships for inner city job seekers; use school transcripts and teacher recommendations when making hiring decisions; and expand "diversity management" initiatives to enhance the retention and productivity of employees from diverse demographic backgrounds; and redesign career ladders to provide workers with initial access at younger ages. (MN)

Across education, out-of-school-time programming, and workforce development, researchers and practitioners are seeking ways to bolster the career readiness of our nation’s youth, particularly low-income youth. This issue brings together information from a variety of disciplines and fields to help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers understand what we know and need to learn to provide youth with effective, engaging career-related programming. The articles highlight key findings about how youth learn about careers and develop a vocational identity, whether adolescent employment is beneficial for youth, and how to align our various systems to promote positive youth development. Models of career programming from education, afterschool, and workforce development are highlighted, as are strategies for collaborating with businesses. The volume emphasizes the practical implications of research findings, keeping the focus on how to develop evidence-based practices to support career development for youth. This is the 134th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.

What role should older workers play in our future work force, when the retirement of the baby boomers, starting about 2010, will make tight labor markets commonplace. This unprecedented demographic shift calls for a fundamental rethinking about the work force of the future. Employer attitudes and policies must change if older workers are to remain in the work force longer. This report recommends a "pro-work" agenda for employers, policymakers, and olders in 6 areas: getting the financial incentives right; replacing stereotypes about older workers; the training imperative; rethinking the org. of work; getting older workers into new jobs: and a strong and flexible safety net.

-- Steven R. Rose, Social Work with Groups.

What do effective youth organizations offer inner-city youngsters that schools do not? This book suggests that educators can learn much from inner-city social and youth organizations, which reach at-risk youngsters by developing a sense of family that many of them fail to get at home. Addressing a variety of issues—collaboration across organizations, the role of gangs in social control, the historical roles of ethnicity and gender in youth organizations—Heath and McLaughlin describe frames for identity that extend beyond ethnicity and gender.