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Educating "Our Girls" and "Welfare Mothers": Discussions of Education Policy for Pregnant and Parenting Adolescents in Federal Hearings, 1975-1995

This article explores federal education policy for pregnant and parenting teenag ers by examining discussions about education in federal hearings from 1975 to 1995. In this period, education policy for teen parents was captive to the two major policy contexts of teen pregnancy: the perceived public health crisis of an "epidemic" of teen pregnancy and the perceived welfare crisis of the 1980s. Images of solo teen mothers associated with these two policy contexts changed the way policymakers defined the educational needs of these young women: During the epidemic, they defined education as an entitlement, but during the perceived welfare crisis, they redefined it as a requirement. The article concludes that the details of education programs were overshadowed by the politics of the two policy crises, resulting in an unexamined increasing reliance on the General Educational Development (GED) test in federal programs.