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Policy Update: January 2017

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SRCD News Related to Child and Family Policy

Register Now! 2017 Zigler Policy Preconference 

The 2017 Zigler Policy Preconference will take place on Wednesday, April 5, from 4:00-6:30 pm in room 406 of the Austin Hilton, followed by a reception from 6:30 to 7:30. As in years past, the Zigler Policy Preconference is co-hosted by SRCD’s Committee for Policy and Communications, SRCD’s Student and Early Career Council, and the University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium. This year, the Zigler Policy Preconference will focus on research on social and emotional learning and its applications. It will feature presentations by four experts addressing social and emotional learning in multiple contexts and across developmental periods, as well as implications for policy and practice. The 2017 Zigler Policy Preconference will feature presentations by: Mark Greenberg, Ph.D., Edna Peterson Bennett Endowed Chair in Prevention Research and Professor of Human Development and Psychology, Pennsylvania State University; Stephanie Jones, Ph.D., Marie and Max Kargman Associate Professor in Human Development and Urban Education Advancement, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Nancy Guerra, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Social Ecology and Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine; and Roger Weissberg, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Education and NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair in Social and Emotional Learning, University of Illinois at Chicago.
 
Registration is $25 for student and early career attendees and $45 for all other attendees; register now to guarantee a spot, registration is capped at 150 attendees. Click here to register for the preconference through SRCD's Biennial Meeting registration system.

Register Now! Supporting Young Children and Their Parents: A Preconference on Two Recent NAS Reports

Preconference, join us for another preconference session, “Supporting Young Children and Their Parents: A Preconference on Two Recent NAS Reports.” This session will take place from 2-4 pm on Wednesday, April 5 in room 416 A/B of the Austin Hilton.Immediately prior to the Zigler Policy 

The scientific evidence on how young children learn, how parents and family members can best support them, how educators can best serve them, and how policies and programs can promote their success reinforces calls for states and school districts to invest at the "front end" of education. This preconference will highlight findings and recommendations from two studies conducted by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
 
The report from the Committee on Fostering School Success for English Learners: Toward New Directions in Policy, Practice, and Research will be released in early 2017. The report will offer findings and recommendations that will inform a research agenda to address the continuum of young language learners and the implementation implications of the recommendations within the frame of cost and scalability. The report from the Committee on Supporting Parents of Young Children, released in July 2016, identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies that have been effective with parents of young children; and barriers to and facilitators of parents’ use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes.
 
This preconference will be chaired by Dr. Vivian Gadsden, William T. Carter Professor of Child Development; Professor of Education; Professor of Africana Studies; Faculty, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies; Director, National Center on Fathers and Families at the University of Pennsylvania as well as President of the American Educational Research Association. Committee members will summarize major research themes and policy recommendations from each report, followed by a federal response designed to highlight salient issues in the recommendations, opportunities for research emanating from each report, and options for moving forward to advance implementation and evaluation. An interactive session with pre-conference participants will follow. Reactions to both reports, thoughts on their points of intersection, and input on the highest priorities for next steps in research, policy, and practice, will be invited.
 
There is no registration fee for this preconference, but please click here to RSVP.

Register Now! Upcoming Webinar on Universal Home Visiting
The University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium, in collaboration with the Society for Research in Child Development, will host "The Potential of Universal Strategies- Innovative Ways to Reach the Most Vulnerable Children” on February 15, 2017.
Date: Wednesday, February 15
Time: 3:00-4:00 PM Eastern Time
About the Webinar: While targeted prevention services such as early home visiting for pregnant women and new parents have achieved notable success, such programs continue to experience high dropout rates and an inability to successfully engage those facing the greatest challenges. Beyond these implementation challenges, targeted programs, which require that families be identified as having certain deficits either economic or personal, can be stigmatizing. The very families one hopes to engage in such efforts may refuse participation for fear of being labeled as being inadequate parents. This webinar will discuss the limitations of current prevention efforts and outline ways in which more universal platforms in structuring our practice, policy and research agendas can improve outcomes for all children. This webinar will feature a presentation by Dr. Deborah Daro, Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall and will be adapted from a plenary session at the 2016 National Research Conference on Early Childhood.  

Click here to register for this webinar.

Spotlight on the SRCD Policy Fellow

Marina Mendoza, Ph.D., is a second year Executive Branch Fellow whose placement is in the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) at the U.S. Department of Justice. Click here to learn more about her work, including working on creating a research agenda for justice-involved young adults.

Legislative Branch Updates

Congressional Action

American Innovation and Competitiveness Act Signed into Law

On January 6, then-President Barack Obama signed into law the “American Innovation and Competitiveness Act” (S.3084). The bipartisan legislation includes nine House Science Committee sponsored bills, as well as H.R. 1086, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act. The legislation aims to boost science and technology research through support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the activities of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy. S.3084 authorizes $17.3 billion for the previously mentioned scientific agencies for 2017-2018 and includes provisions intended to reduce regulatory and administrative burdens on researchers. For more information on this legislation, click here to read our coverage in last month’s Policy Update. House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) released a press release stating “This important piece of legislation was the last bill passed in the 114th Congress, and is the result of a four-year effort to strengthen and reform agencies and programs that administer basic research. AICA increases U.S. competitiveness while creating jobs for hardworking Americans and will help to spur new businesses and industries.” The release goes on to describe how S.3084 incorporates Chairman Smith’s “national interest criterion” as part of the merit review process at NSF. For more information, click here.

Cabinet Hearings of Interest to SRCD Members

As Congressional committee hearings on President Trump’s cabinet nominees continue, two confirmation hearings that might be of particular interest to SRCD members are of those nominated to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Secretary of Education. Click here to watch the hearing of Dr. Tom Price, nominated to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Click here to watch the hearing of Betsy DeVos, nominated to serve as Secretary of Education. The Senate has not yet held a confirmation vote on either of these nominees.

Executive Branch Updates

Final Changes to the Common Rule Released 

On January 18, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that the work of 16 federal agencies to update the regulations providing safeguards for human participants in research had been completed. The press release announcing the release of the final regulations, frequently referred to as the Common Rule, is available here. The full text of the final rule is available here. The final rule takes into account input received during a period of comment on an initial draft, incorporating some but not all of the initial proposed revisions released for comment in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).  This Social Policy Report provides an analysis of the proposed revisions in the NPRM from the perspective of research involving children completed by SRCD’s Task Force on Proposed Changes to the Common Rule. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), of which SRCD is a Governing Member, has released a summary and analysis of key provisions in the updated rule, and the extent to which they reflect provisions in the NPRM. According to COSSA’s analysis, the changes are generally positive for the social and behavioral sciences. Key points according to COSSA’s analysis include the following:

  • The final rule does not include the new category of “excluded research” activities that had been proposed in the NPRM, as adding this to the existing categories of “non-research activities” and “exempt research” was considered confusing. Instead the final rule clarifies what should be categorized as non-research and what should be categorized as exempt research. Research that is exempt will still need to undergo review by an institutional review board (IRB) to confirm that this is the appropriate categorization. The categories for exempt research have been expanded from six to eight. The eight categories include the following of particular relevance to the social and behavioral sciences: research in educational settings involving normal educational practices; research involving only educational tests, survey procedures, or observations of public behavior; research focusing on benign behavioral interventions with information collected from adult subjects; secondary research with identifiable private information or biospecimens for which consent is not required; and research and demonstration projects conducted to evaluate, improve or examine the public benefit of service programs supported by Federal Departments and agencies.
  • The final rule includes a new section summarizing the requirements of informed consent. It emphasizes that the purpose of the informed consent process is to inform potential participants in research rather than to protect institutions from litigation. It requires that consent documents begin with key information, presented in a manner that fosters comprehension, that will assist potential subjects in assessing whether or not to participate in the research.
  • The final rule drops the proposal in the NPRM to classify de-identified biospecimens as human subjects research. This means that de-identified biospecimens will not be subject to the human subjects research regulations. However, acknowledging the potential for rapid change in identifiability of biospecimens, the final rule discusses a process for review and reconsideration of identifiability.
  • In order to clarify which studies involve minimal risk and are therefore eligible for expedited review by an IRB chair of his or her designee, the Secretary of HHS will publish a list of activities considered to involve minimal risk. This list will be reviewed and updated every eight years. Studies involving only activities on this list will be eligible for expedited review unless the IRB provides a rationale for overriding this.
  • Multi-site research will now involve use of a single IRB of record, rather than involving separate review by each institution’s IRB.

NIH Clinical Trials Policies Released  

On September 16, 2016, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released new clinical trials policies and related efforts. The following month, Dr. William Riley, Director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at NIH, released a Director’s Voice blog post detailing the implications of these policies for behavioral and social science researchers. These new policies are designed to improve clinical trials throughout the entire process, focusing on issues such as accountability and transparency. Dr. Riley’s blog post defines components of the NIH definition of a clinical trial, providing context for terms such as “research” and “human subjects”, “one or more”, “prospectively assigned”, and “intervention” as they relate to the social and behavioral sciences. For example, the NIH clinical trial policies define the purpose of interventions as manipulating the participant’s environment “to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.” Dr. Riley notes that depending on how broadly this definition is interpreted, basic human research could potentially fall under this category even though researchers may not always consider such work a clinical trial. To address this issue and others specific to the behavioral and social sciences, OBSSR is creating a working group on the new NIH clinical trial policies to determine whether more guidance from NIH is needed. Dr. Riley’s blog post also provides a summary of new policies spanning the entire clinical trial process from grant applications to public dissemination. These policies take effect at different points during 2017 and include the Good Clinical Practice (GCP) Training, Specific FOA for Clinical Trials, Single Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Multi-site Studies, Enhanced Clinical Trial Reporting, and Clinical Trials Protocol Template. Dr. Riley closed his blog post urging researchers to adhere to these new policies, stating, “While adhering to these policies may require additional time and effort, the intention of these policies - to ensure rigorously and appropriately conducted research, to rapidly disseminate positive and negative research findings, and to provide NIH with the tools to serve as good stewards of the research we fund – are broadly applicable principles with which we all agree.” Click here to read the full Director’s Voice blog post and for links to more information on NIH’s clinical trial policies.

Leadership Changes at Institute of Education Sciences

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) announced leadership changes on January 3, 2017. Dr. Ruth Curran Neild, who had served as IES director since July 2015, left her position as of January 13, 2017. Duties of the Director have been delegated to Dr. Thomas W. Brock, Commissioner for the National Center for Education Research (NCER). Dr. Brock has served as NCER Commissioner for the past four years, and will continue in that position in addition to taking on the duties of the director. Read more in IES’ press release.

NIH Director Francis Collins Remains in Position 

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will remain NIH Director for the time being. The NIH released a statement on January 19 staying that Dr. Collins “has been held over by the Trump administration” but that they have “no additional details at this time.” It is unclear how long Dr. Collins will remain in the position; if not asked to stay permanently, he has indicated his intent to return to his NIH lab.

Federal Reports and Requests

Reports

New Reports and Briefs from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation 

Several new publications are available from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These publications include evaluations of healthy relationship programs to address intimate partner violence, briefs on different components of the Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Study, reports on early care and education, employment for low income adults, parenting, and teacher practices, among others:


(1) Fathers’ Views of Co-Parenting Relationships: Findings From The PACT Evaluation
(2) RIViR Practice Brief: Evidence for Understanding How Healthy Relationship Programs May Influence Intimate Partner Violence
(3) State of the Evidence: Evidence on Recognizing and Addressing Intimate Partner Violence in Healthy Relationship Programs
(4) Healthy Relationship Program Influences: Evidence for Understanding How Healthy Relationship Programs May Influence Intimate Partner Violence
(5) Gaps in the Evidence on Employment and Training for Low-Income Adults
(6) Head Start Health Matters: Tabulations by Region from the 2012–2013 Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Study for Regions I–XII
(7) Addressing Overweight and Obesity in Head Start: Insights from the Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Study
(8) Addressing Mental Health, Behavioral Health, and Social and Emotional Well-Being in Head Start: Insights from the Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Study
(9) Family Engagement in the Delivery of the Health Services Component in Head Start and Early Head Start
(10) Addressing Oral Health in Head Start: Insights from the Head Start Health Manager Descriptive Study
(11) Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services: An Evaluation to Improve Service Delivery and Effectiveness
(12) Accomplishments of the Domestic Violence Hotline, Online Connections and Text: Initial Findings and Next Steps
(13) Developing a Tool to Examine Teachers’ Use of Ongoing Child Assessment to Individualize Instruction
(14) The CCDF Policies Database Book of Tables: Key Cross-State Variations in CCDF Policies as of October 1, 2015
(15) Professional Development Tools to Improve the Quality of Infant and Toddler Care: A Review of the Literature
(16) The Use of Technology to Support Early Childhood Practice: Protecting Child, Parent, and Practitioner Privacy
 

New Reports, Briefs, and Research Summaries from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) 
Several new publications are available from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These publications include reports on the effects of the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) subsidies on maternal participation in the workforce, impacts of the Affordable Care Act in a variety of areas, domestic violence interventions, and early care and education policies, among others:

(1) Effects of the CCDF Subsidy Program on the Employment Outcomes of Low Income Mothers
(2) The Effects of Child Care Subsidies on Maternal Labor Force Participation in the United States
(3) Social Risk Factors and Performance Under Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing Programs
(4) Health Insurance Coverage for Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions: The Impact of the Affordable Care Act
(5) Status of State Efforts to Integrate Health and Human Services Systems and Data: 2016
(6) Continuing Progress on the Opioid Epidemic: The Role of the Affordable Care Act
(7) Evidence Indicates a Range of Challenges for Puerto Rico Health Care System
(8) A Policy to Provide Child Care Access for All Working Families: Effects on Mothers’ Employment and Caseload
(9) Factors Associated with Reduced Expulsion in Center-based Early Learning Settings: Preliminary Findings from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE)
(10) Income and Employment Fluctuations among Low-Income Working Families and Their Implications for Child Care Subsidy Policy
(11) Exploring the Relationship Between Paid Family Leave and the Well-being of Low-Income Families: Lessons from California
(12) Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Safety Net Hospitals
(13) National Health Service Corps – An Extended Analysis
(14) Building the Evidence for Domestic Violence Services & Interventions: Challenges, Areas of Opportunity, and Research Priorities
(15) Medicaid Expansion Impacts on Insurance Coverage and Access to Care
(16) Did Consumers Respond to Changes in Gross Premiums or to Changes in Premiums Net of Tax Credits When Making Health Plan Choices in the 2016 ACA Marketplaces
(17) Final Report Volume I: Background Paper, Declining Response Rates in Federal Surveys: Trends and Implications

Federal Funding Opportunities

This month’s FFO highlights a National Institute of Justice funding opportunity aimed at producing practical knowledge that can improve the safety of schools and students. The initiative is carried out through partnerships between researchers, educators, and other stakeholders, including law enforcement and mental health professionals. This solicitation includes multiple funding categories with different expectations and requirements to accomplish the purposes of the initiative. Completed applications are due by March 24, 2017. Click here to read about this and other federal funding opportunities.