Jane Waldfogel

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at the Columbia University School of Social Work and a research associate at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Waldfogel has written extensively about the impact of public policies on child and family well-being. Her research includes studies of work-family policies, inequality in early childhood care and education, and the black-white achievement gap.

During her Radcliffe fellowship, Waldfogel will write a book on Britain’s war on poverty. In March 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged to end child poverty in twenty years. Drawing on research she has conducted in the United Kingdom over the past ten years, she will chronicle the origins of the country’s antipoverty initiative and progress in its first decade and draw out lessons for antipoverty policy in the United States.

Waldfogel received her PhD in public policy from Harvard University. Her books include What Children Need (Harvard University Press, 2006), Securing the Future: Investing in Children from Birth to College (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), and The Future of Child Protection: How to Break the Cycle of Abuse and Neglect (Harvard University Press, 1998). Waldfogel has written more than a hundred articles and book chapters, and her work has been published in many leading academic journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, American Sociological Review, Child Development, Demography, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Monthly Labor Review, and Pediatrics.