Speech To Focus On Plans To Help Essays - Rodham Family,

Speech to focus on plans to help children, poor January 19, 1999 BY JUDITH HAVEMANN AND WALTER PINCUS WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON--President Clinton will propose in his State of the Union address tonight a $1 billion expansion of the federal government's efforts to help the nation's most disadvantaged families move from welfare to work, White House officials said Monday. The officials said the initiative will help about 200,000 welfare families get jobs. ``Despite the enormous progress we have made in the last few years in moving people from welfare to work, we need to make an extra effort for the people still on the rolls because they will be the hardest to place,'' said presidential adviser Bruce Reed. The initiative is aimed at increasing employment of low-income, absent fathers of children on welfare, so they can pay child support and get involved in their children's lives. Many of these fathers have prison records, and only 30 percent have held a job in the past year, according to a recent study. Only about 10 percent to 15 percent of children on public assistance receive any formal child support from their absent parent. Clinton also plans to propose a tax credit of up to $500 per child, age 1 or younger, to offset costs for parents who choose to stay home to care for their kids. The proposal is part of a larger child care package that seeks $18 billion over five years to aid working poor and middle-class families. The administration also will propose $1 billion over five years to improve health care for many of the nation's 32 million uninsured adults. The money would be used to encourage community clinics and hospitals to work together to keep track of patients and make sure they get needed treatment. Scheduled for delivery in the House chamber at 8 p.m. Chicago time, shortly after his lawyers wrap up their first day of arguments in the Senate impeachment trial, Clinton's speech will not include a single mention of the word impeachment, aides said. The president insisted on going ahead with his speech, despite its awkward timing, to demonstrate that he is conducting business as usual even as the Senate considers whether to remove him from office. Among other domestic and foreign policy proposals previewed Monday by White House officials were: * An initiative to bring greater accountability to state and local school systems. Clinton will offer a five-point plan to hold schools accountable for the $20 billion in federal educational spending they receive. The plan would reward districts that make sure teachers are qualified in the subjects they are assigned to teach, enforce classroom discipline, intervene to help low-performing schools, end social promotion of students who have not mastered the material taught during the year and issue ``report cards'' to parents on issues such as class size, teacher qualifications and student scores. * A near doubling--to $4.2 billion--over the next five years of the U.S. program helping to dismantle Russia's aging nuclear and biological weapons, protect facilities holding nuclear materials and create nonmilitary research projects for Moscow's former weapons builders.

My Development as Interpreted by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory Essays

My Development as Interpreted by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory Essays My Development as Interpreted by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory Essay My Development as Interpreted by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory Essay After analyzing Bronfenbrenner’s theory (1979; Bronfenbrenner Ceci, 1994), I used it to interpret my development.   At the microscopic level (the child’s genetic characteristics, e.g., genetic sex, and predispositions), a probable predisposition towards being athletic interacted positively with my relationships with peers and involvement in team sports (mesosystem influences).   Another mesosystem influence, responsibilities in caring for my younger brothers and sister, influenced my values about children and career goals. Exosystem influences worked to my advantage since, for example, the mass media has glorified athletic success, and macrosystem influences, the general culture and its subgroups, led to a football scholarship, making it possible to attend college.   These influences led to enrolling in a Master’s program to prepare me for working with children having adjustment difficulties. At the time Bronfenbrenner was developing an ecological theory of development (1979), the social learning theory that development was a function of the environment acting on a passive child was dominant (Bandura, 1977).  Ã‚   Bronfenbrenner recognized that the child actively influenced environmental responses (1979).   As examples, happy babies elicit more responsive behaviors from caretakers than babies with more difficult temperaments (e.g., Keller Scholmerich, 1987) and sociable children receive more positive attention than shy children from their peers (e.g., Adler Adler, 1998).   Also contrary to social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), Bronfenbrenner recognized that while controlled experiments were important, we also needed to study children in their natural contexts, as they actually behaved in their homes, schools, playgrounds, etc., and that parents were only one of the important influences on development (1979).   His theory has been an important influence on curr ent theories, which have â€Å"moved beyond a focus on main effects of parenting to efforts to understand complex interactions between individuals and their environments† (Vandell, 2000, p. 700). Bronfenbrenner’s theory (1979) was that development began with the child, prior to environmental influences (the microsystem), then expanded to relationships in the mesosystem, i.e., early environmental influences children experienced directly, typically in their own neighborhoods, e.g., their immediate families, peers, schools.   Development also included indirect influences, the exosystem, e.g., public health services, school policies.   Contrary to Bronfenbrenner’s earlier observations (1970) and also to current research findings (e.g., Werner Smith, 1992), examples of indirect influences also included adults such as neighbors and extended family (1979).   Interactions with adults outside of one’s immediate family (e.g., neighbors, aunts, uncles) have positively influenced the development of children (e.g., Werner Smith, 1992).   The broadest influences, the macrosystem, were both the dominant culture and groups within this culture (e.g., socioeconom ic status, SES). Science is impersonal, and new empirical evidence should result in the modification of existing theory.   As Bandura was influenced by findings inconsistent with social learning theory and developed social-cognitive theory (1989), Bronfenbrenner revised his theory based on findings of behavioral-genetic researchers that there are inherited predispositions for a wide variety of personality characteristics (e.g., depression, Behar, 1980; attitudes, Tesser, 1993; alcoholism, Hill, 1990; shyness, Kagan, Reznick, Snidman, 1988).   In Bronfenbrenner’s revised bioecological theory, the microsystem, the child’s initial state, has been expanded in order to understand the extent to which these predispositions become manifested (i.e., how genotypes become phenotypes) by interacting with the influences in the other systems described above (2005; Bronfenbrenner Ceci, 1994). Influences on my development After my birth, my young mother worked and also returned to high school.   We lived in an urban lower SES environment, with a high crime rate, gangs, and easy access to drugs.   According to Bronfenbrenner (1979), the microsystem (i.e., me) would be interacting with less than favorable influences, beginning with the macrosystem’s (lower SES) influence on the exosystem (e.g., under-funding of schools and community services) and mesosystem (e.g., too little access to parents, too much access to drug-using, gang-member peers).   In an interview (Addison, 1992), Bronfenbrenner remained critical of our society’s failure to establish conditions where work and other settings were designed to incorporate the needs of families:   â€Å"We have to have social policies that enable family life and work to be carried on simultaneously†¦our country is far behind in   making the necessary rearrangements† (p. 17). Based on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory (Bronfenbrenner Ceci, 1994), the genetic predispositions of the child, i.e., the microsystem, interacted with influences from the other levels.   I can make inferences about my own predispositions, based on autobiographical memories of events that occurred after the age of two or three (the ages most of us believe we were at the time of our reported earliest memories, Mullen, 1994).  Ã‚   Since childhood, I remember enjoying and excelling at sports, thus I probably was predisposed to being athletic.   This was a most fortunate predisposition because even in childhood, consistent with research (Adler Adler, 1998), being athletic resulted in high status among my peers, in turn increasing my confidence, and possibly a reason why I was sociable and made friends easily. Untangling predispositions is difficult because, for example, a predisposition for being athletic certainly could have contributed to my becoming sociable, but there also is a genetic predisposition for being sociable (i.e., extroversion,   Owen Sines, 1970), which, in turn, is a reason why children find it easy to make friends (Adler Adler, 1998).   In my case, as in most families, my relatives range from being highly extraverted to being highly introverted, with most being at neither extreme on the introversion-extraversion personality dimension.   Nonetheless, it is likely that a genetic predisposition for being athletic was a reason for being in a favorable position in terms of my mesosystem. Sports also led me to join church-sponsored teams and then middle- and high-school teams.   Despite the TV ads and despite the delusions of some parents, kids from all SES groups are involved, to varying extents, with drugs, especially marijuana (Johnston, O’Malley, Bachman, 1998).   Usage in my neighborhood was lower among team members than among other groups.   In lower SES neighborhoods (the macrosystem) similar to where I grew up, there was status associated with being in a gang.   The gang members were heavy users of drugs such as crack cocaine, cheaper than the cocaine available in higher SES groups, but nonetheless requiring money that could be made by dealing. Since poverty is a good predictor of criminal behavior (Bjerk, 2007), it isn’t surprising that low SES youth are over-represented, relative to middle-class youth, in the juvenile (so-called) justice system.   In my neighborhood, it wasn’t unusual for a preteen boy with a reputation for using crack to experience his first encounter with the long arm of the law, an influence from the macrosystem.   Contrary to exosystem influences on middle-class youth, the legal services available to low SES youth and the greater penalties given to offenses involving the less expensive crack cocaine probably would result in this preteen boy from my neighborhood winding up in a mesosystem consisting of young future criminals, AKA Juvenile Detention.   Many people are fond of theories of between-group genetic differences (not part of Bronfenbrenner’s theory), which often become best-selling junk psychology books (e.g., Herrnstein Murray, 1994).   Thus it is important to note that early (e.g., Dobzhansky Montagu, 1947, cited in Montagu, 1974) and continued consistent evidence (reviewed in Neisser, 1997) has disconfirmed theories of between-group genetic differences, and whatever genetic predispositions the preteen boy I described had were not a result of his low SES. My own involvement and talent in sports resulted in a football scholarship that made it possible for me to go to college.   There have been newspaper debates about what scholarships in high-profile sports imply about our culture’s values, but, for me, the macrosystem’s interaction with other systems was a blessing.   I had some thoughts about professional football, but my football-playing days ended after a knee injury.   Because of experiences with children, described below, I majored in criminal justice, hoping to find a job working with youthful offenders. My mesosystem includes five younger brothers and a younger sister.   My mom needed to work and she counted on me to care for my brothers and sister in her absence. My relationship with my mom has always been positive, and I did not resent having grown-up responsibilities.   In fact, I felt proud that my mom trusted me (a positive contribution to my mesosystem) and I began to learn that our society devalues the worth of caring for children.   I didn’t and don’t believe that the jobs older children in my neighborhood had – delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, etc. – were as rewarding as caring for my younger siblings.   In the world of adult work, daycare-center teachers and aides are among the most poorly paid workers, suggesting a cultural lack of concern (a macrosystem influence) about where we leave our children (influencing their microsystems). My own positive experiences with my siblings influenced my desire to work with children.   However, after I graduated from college, with a major in criminal justice, I wasn’t able to find such a job.   I became certified as an emergency medical technician, and, in this capacity, work as a firefighter, a job that is satisfying, but does not provide the rewards I had hoped to find in my work.   I enjoy being the father of two children, being involved in their lives and the lives of their friends, and I also enjoy coaching little-league football.   These activities, an important part of my mesosystem, are rewarding and have helped in convincing me to return to my earlier goal of working with children.   Thus, as described above, Bronfenbrenner’s levels of influence ultimately led to my enrollment in a Master’s program in General Human Services, a degree that will qualify me for jobs that involve working with children who are having difficulties in adjustin g to traumatic life events, such as child abuse.

Evaluation of the Internal and External Environments Essays

Evaluation of the Internal and External Environments Essays Evaluation of the Internal and External Environments Paper Evaluation of the Internal and External Environments Paper Evaluation of the internal and external environments is then followed by crucial decisions grading long and short-term goals and finally organizes for the implementation of the plan of action. The internal and external environments of Logo and Harley Davidson companies are described using an environmental scan. Environmental Scanning According to Wheeled Hunger an environmental scan is the monitoring, evaluation, and dissemination of information from the external and internal environments to key people with the corporation (Wheeled Hunger, 201 0, p. 8). External environments are identified by the possible opportunities and threats outside the organization. Internal environments are identified by the strengths and weaknesses within the organization. In addition, successful businesses analyze the following forces that drive industry competition, threat Of new entrants, rivalry among existing firms, threat Of substitute products or services, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and relative power of other stakeholders. Logos Internal Environment According to Metcalf Alfresco (2013), inbound logistics, which emphasizes on raw material, is fundamental in the companys operations. It acquires her main bulk of chemical materials from Leanness, a German company that provides standardized ingredients without any bottleneck that may interfere with Logos company. Logo further focuses on their products future demands by ensuring proper product mix. Although it is a cumbersome and technical forecast, the company has always done it successfully via utilization of software and analytical approach in achieving their goal. Moreover, Logo has optimally managed their manufacturing process in a way that high quality products are produced with minimal incidences of faultiness and wastage. The companys patented plastic ingredient ensures durable product and desirable colors as well as adherence to the European CE-labeling thus ensuring conformation with the European Union legislation (Hauser Robertson, 2009). Additionally, Logo has outsourced their distribution to DEL Excel Supply Chain in Eastern Europe hence reducing excess capacity during Summer when sales are low. It further helps them to concentrate in the production services and letting experts do their distributions. Logo has also diversified their operations such as entering into a strategic partnership with organizations such as Lucas Arts and Warner Pros that has enabled Star Wars and Harry Porter act as the savior of Logo (Metcalf Alfresco, 2013). Hauser Robertson (2009), posit that several businesses combinations that Logo has entered itself in make it enjoy indirect marketing thus contributing to their dramatic increase in sales. The company has been expanding their production facility closer to their customers as well as numerous promotional strategies such as conventional media and philanthropic charity. The company also uses superior prices and avoids any engagement in price tragedy and associates their high prices with better quality. It has also integrated some of their programs with educational institutions as a way of improving their products. Logos External Environment Considering Logos bargaining power, their significant supplier is within the chemical market that is very competitive thus reducing the suppliers bargaining power. The company has categorized their suppliers based on rockiness hence making their largest suppliers to be in low risk countries and smaller group of suppliers in high-risk countries. Companies in the toy industries including Logo have ensured low suppliers bargaining power. Retailers play an important role in selling and distributing Logos company (Hauser Robertson, 2009). Additionally, Logo has huge cost advantage since it does their production in low waged regions as well as the advantage of economies of scale. Logo also enjoys a vast variety of expertise that enables them to make competitive decisions. In addition, they have high brand equity that have been created for a long time. Metcalf Alfresco (2013), argue that Logo has addressed the issue of threat brought about by computer games by paving to electronic gaming. Logo enjoys loyal customers worldwide with exclusive licenses, solid distribution network, financial liberty as well as market experience. Harley Davidson Internal Environment According to Agnostic (201 3), Harley Davidson is amongst the leading motorcycle companies that have applied technology to their image thus making it stay competitive. The organization possesses a lot of internal resources that strengthen their long-term strategies. It has a great corporate structure that counts as amongst the first divisional structure that used just in mime inventory strategy. It is involved in a diversified kind of business that not only includes motorcycles but also includes other related products and financial services. Moreover, the companys decision-making process is decentralized and every department is accorded responsibility to deal with various issues. Harley Davidson is so much concentrated on deep emotional customer link via their services and products and this greatly attracts many customers who feel that the company cares for them. The companys relationship of employees is so close and awesome as the top management is loosely bonded to other employees thus easing decision-making process. Harley Davidson culture is aimed at preserving and maintaining the organization through constant product and service quality as well as achievement of financial success. The company always works at adding value to their products as well as creating image and attracting new customers. It has successfully licensed their products and this has really enhanced their image. The organization sells their products through a wide network of dealers who have ensured a wide customer base especially in America (Agnostic, 2013). Harley Davidson treats their customers by offering them 1 year membership to the Harley owners group and further conducts rallies that help in showcasing and demonstrating their new products. It uses value over price strategy and provides company information online. Harley Davidson has strong financial position making it be in a favorable position to withstand falling prices and increased costs. It further uses strong RD by investing in new technology that makes it manufacture powerful, lighter, stronger and finest motorcycles possible (Robertson Equalize, 2010). Harley Davidson External Environment According to Robertson Equalize (201 0), demand for motorcycles in the sporting industry has grown very high and Harley Davidson is so much trusted due to their high quality production. Being a IIS based company it enjoys a wider market segment because most people trust and love made in U. S products particularly when it comes to motorcycles. Harley Davidson enjoys efficient supply of sheet metal, coils and other raw materials from the favorable supply bases. The company dwells on its success in the heavyweight motorcycles beating highly competitive substitutes such as Yamaha, Honda and Sukiyaki. Measurement Guidelines Both Harley Davidson and Logo use profit and increase in revenue as the measurement guidelines of the effectiveness of their strategies. The number of sales made and the ability to beat competitors in terms of revenue generated and the number of units sold remains integral way of ascertaining the effectiveness of the companies strategies. Also, Harley-Davidson and Logo focus on the wide market coverage especially the overseas market as a way of achieving their effectiveness. Measurement guidelines for both companies are indeed very effective and positive since they focus on the main objective of every business, making profit. Unless business revenue rises and profit increase is experienced, a business cannot be said to be making a progress and achieving their objectives. Conclusion Both Logo and Harley Davidson have demonstrated that environmental scanning has been essential to their success in identifying internal and external environments. Their long-term strategic plan has been successful because their ability to focus on what works and what do not in regards to internal and external forces. They were able to gain and maintain nominative advantage over their competitors by knowing their strengths and weaknesses.