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"Rollins students make up more than half of the adult mentoring force at Fern Creek, spending at least one hour a week with their designated child. The college also has helped develop a science lab at the elementary school, resurrected an arts club, taught a robotics class, painted classrooms, worked on landscaping projects, directed a theater production and donated more than 1,000 books to the school's library."

"David Brown, the executive director of Grace Scholars, an SSO that serves 900 students in the Augusta area and 17,000 in Georgia, said he hopes the new transparency encourages more individuals and businesses to donate to a child's private education. Like GOAL, Grace already targets low-income families and publishes its financial data to the public voluntarily. However, he has seen evidence of abuses when donors call his office to ask whether they can contribute to their own child at a particular school and then receive a tax credit."

"If enacted, the measures promise to have a particularly pernicious effect on students from low-income families without college-educated parents. The National Council of La Raza and the Education Trust, advocates for poor and minority students, have labeled the proposed changes a retreat from progress' that would take Texas back to the bad old days of pervasive tracking.'"

"With support and guidance from Students Rising Above, a local nonprofit, these Bay Area youth are now in college. But for many low-income and minority students who have had suffered trauma as children, financial aid and good grades aren't the biggest challenges. College means they can escape their situation, but it also means leaving behind siblings, friends and family who are still stuck in cycles of violence, drugs and poverty."

"More alarming is the rising number of young people who have dropped out of the system. Regionally, 14,000 youths ages 16-19 are not in school or working. Over their lifetime, they will cost us an estimated $13 billion in lost earnings, lower tax revenue and higher social service spending. What's harder to cost out is the lost potential of a young person who lacks the skills to get a career-track job, failing to break free of the poverty cycle."

"Florida school districts typically have used teacher recommendations and then an IQ test to identify gifted children. But teachers as gatekeepers' are problematic, Ford said, because most teachers aren't trained to spot gifted kids and often overlook the poor, minorities and those still learning English, as they don't fit their notion of the very bright. In Ford's view, traditional IQ tests also are biased against those groups, exacerbating the problem."

"One of this year's worst pieces of legislation would cut state welfare benefits to a family if a child doesn't do well in school. The theory is that cutting benefits to a poor family will cause parents to take greater responsibility for their child's education. This unfortunate piece of legislation is nave in its supposition, ill advised in targeting children, uninformed about the causes of underperforming students and insensitive to its potential consequences. We urge lawmakers to remove it from consideration."

"Perhaps most worrisome, many high-achieving, low-income students do not attend a selective college, despite their qualifications, and ultimately do not receive a bachelor's degree. Among the top 4 percent of students in the high school class of 2008, based on test scores and grades, only 34 percent of those from low-income households attended a selective college, according to Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery."

"Rep. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, added an unexpected provision to her sweeping education accountability bill Thursday: a pitch to free Florida school districts from having to provide private tutoring services at low-income schools."

"If independent Portland lawmaker Ben Chipman's proposed legislation passes, college tuition could be covered for high-achieving Maine high schoolers living in poverty."

"The truth is that S.C. public schools are vastly outperforming their demographics. Our fourth graders who are not poor are reading better than or equal to peers in 21 states. Our teachers work miracles under intensely challenging conditions. They can do better with proper resources, but they have nothing to apologize for. Education is the best weapon we have against poverty. Unfortunately for those who struggle, our budgets don't allow for the kinds of interventions that other states invest in."

"An educational advocacy group released its third annual District Report Cards on Wednesday, showing that half the largest unified districts in the Bay Area improved in their efforts to educate low-income students and those who are African-American or Latino."