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Professor Brenda Bushouse of the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science has received a Faculty Research Grant to support her work on US child policy.
Bushouse will use the funds for her project Philanthropy, Advocates and Child Policy in the United States. The grant was awarded by the UMass Amherst Office of Research Development.
The project, Bushouse says, is fueled by a question: why, despite surveys indicating that Americans value children, does the US has such relatively high rates of infant mortality, child poverty, child abuse, and other gauges of child wellness? “If everyone says they care about kids so much, why do we have such terrible indicators in this country?” she asks. “Why are we doing so poorly by our children?”
Bushouse is analyzing more than 100 years of advocacy on behalf of children for policy change in the areas of early childhood education, child labor, health and nutrition, and child abuse. Her work focuses on understanding the full range of actors and their impacts on policy successes and failures. (Some early work on the project was done in collaboration with Doug Imig of the University of Memphis.) The research is part of SPP’s emphasis on policies for social change.
The Faculty Research Grant will allow Bushouse to expand her work to look at the role that foundations have played in the success of these movements—an issue that she became interested in while writing her first book, Universal Preschool: Policy Change, Stability and the Pew Charitable Trusts (SUNY Press). In that work, Bushouse examined why so many state governments were making major investments in early childhood education, when conventional wisdom would suggest such an investment wouldn’t yield significant political benefits. (“Theory tells us when you’re a child, who doesn’t vote, you tend to be overlooked,” she notes.) She found that in many cases, financial support from the Pew Charitable Trusts made the difference. “In some states, advocates wouldn’t have had the capacity without Pew.”
In her new work, Bushouse will look at major foundations that have helped fund advocacy movements on behalf of children. “They’re the hidden actor that policy scholars overlook in their analysis, but they can have big impacts on agenda setting and advancing policies,” she says.
Researching foundations requires some “detective work,” Bushouse says. “They are private actors that are not required to divulge information beyond their annual IRS filings. To understand why they make the decisions they do, it takes some sleuthing.” She’ll delve deeply into media coverage, records of Congressional hearings, White House conferences, IRS data, foundation archival materials, interviews, and other sources to create an original data set that illuminates the role foundations play in funding child-focused social movements, the strategies used by advocates in those movements, and their effectiveness in changing policy.
Bushouse aims to publish a book about her findings targeted to policy scholars and philanthropy researchers, as well as scholars in related fields who study children. “We have solid social science research that says if we invest in them early, children will experience better outcomes later in life, and yet the US continues to underinvest,” she says. “My work aims to explain successes and failures so that we can better understand US child policy with an eye to how we can do better by our children.”
About the School of Public Policy: Established in 2016, the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy is a hub for research and teaching, preparing students for leadership in public service. The program’s focuses include social change and public policy related to science and technology.
— Maureen Turner, communications manager, School of Public Policy
