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"Low-income schools traditionally have been a training ground for novice teachers and a depository for ineffective ones. A string of ineffective teachers is a deal killer for disadvantaged students who get little enrichment at home and can rarely make up the lost ground."

"A new report documents large differences in academic performance, course participation and discipline actions by race and income in the Burlington School District. The Equity and Inclusion Report released this week also found only slight progress has been made toward district goals to recruit more teachers of color. In a school system where 30 percent of students are non-white, just 4.4 percent of teachers look like them."

"Campus administration plans to phase out Help One Person Excel scholarships, a program that has assisted more than 1,500 Edison State students since its introduction in 1993. Recipients are predominantly low-income, minority, first-generation college students."

"Last month, the Chicago Board of Education announced it would close 54 schools, affecting 30,000 children, mostly in low-income, African-American neighborhoods on the city's South and West sides."

"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."

"County commissioners Tuesday cut a series of federally supported community service programs that feed impoverished seniors and bus children to Head Start centers. The sequester cuts $1.9 million in grants for those programs, leaving seniors without breakfast, poor children without rides and bus drivers without jobs."

"Springfield receives the largest cut of federal funding locally at nearly $8 million, including more than $5 million through Title I. With potential cuts of 5 percent in July and an additional 8 percent in October, Miller said the district stands to lose nearly $1 million in federal funding."

"The measure would cut monthly benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program if a child fails to maintain satisfactory academic progress.' Supporters noted that those cuts could be avoided if parents attend conferences with teachers, take parenting classes or enroll their children in tutoring programs or summer school."

"Last week's vote by the Senate Education and Career Development Committee to approve an early childhood education pilot program - but without the funding included when the House passed the bill 93-6 - could mean that an estimated 1,000 low-income Hoosier children will miss out on a vital start to their schooling."

"Sandwiched between Governor Patrick's call for major increases in spending for early childhood education and public higher education is a modest bump of $5 million to extend the school day in fiscal year 2014. The money is focused precisely where it belongs middle school students in high-poverty districts."

"The risks of a high rate of failure among Mark Twain's third-graders next year point to what some educators say is a worrisome part of the state's reading act: A disproportionate share of those who fail will likely be poor children. Most could be boys. An Oklahoma Watch analysis of state test data from 2012 found that elementary schools with higher rates of low-income students had greater shares of third-graders who scored poorly on reading."

"Those debating the Baker plan don't seem to realize that administrators and teachers have increased significantly the number of Prince George's students taking college-level courses like Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate. More students than ever before are passing those exams, written and graded by outside experts."