Joy
Dryfoos
Joy G. Dryfoos is a nationally recognized expert on schools, education policy, and the lives of adolescents in America today.
The most recent of her six major books, Adolescence: Growing Up in America Today (Oxford, 2006, coauthor Carol Barkin) is an urgent wake-up call for policymakers, parents, and administrators, with statistics and analysis showing that nearly one third of our adolescents are on the brink of dropping out of society because we have failed to act in their best interests. Dryfoos demonstrates what needs to be done immediately, in our schools, homes, courts, and communities, to save our young people.
A lifetime of research, study, and writing informs the powerful insights in Adolescence. From 1984 to 2002, with support from the Carnegie Corporation, Dryfoos conducted a “youth-at-risk” project focusing on substance abuse, delinquency, school failure, and teen pregnancy. In her books and more than 100 articles and book chapters, she has presented strategies for developing comprehensive programs at the community, state, and federal levels; documented the proliferation and value of school-based youth and family resource centers; shown how families, schools, and communities can ensure that adolescents grow into responsible adults; and developed a model for full-service community schools.
Dryfoos is a founder and advisor to the Coalition for Community Schools and is on the steering committee of the Boston Roundtable for Full-Service Schools. She has been a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health. She consults widely, and has served on the Committee on Comprehensive School Health of the Institute of Medicine, the Panels on High Risk Youth and Adolescent Pregnancy of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Carnegie Task Force on Youth Development and Community Programs. Her work is included in the Sophia Smith collection of noted women at Smith College. She received the Charles Loring Brace Award from the Children's Aid Society in 2001.
(full vita)
Author photo by Debbie Kates.