Latest Coverage

"Rutherford County Sheriff's Office initiated the Shop with the Sheriff event in 2011 to help 25 of the 600-plus homeless students enrolled in Rutherford County Schools. To fund the event, Sheriff Robert Arnold and other school resource officers partnered with Toot's South restaurant by asking customers to donate money."

"Evers' request aims to address discrepancies in taxing by incorporating a poverty weighting factor of 30% to account for family income. Currently, state funding for a district hinges largely on its property values. That could significantly benefit places such as the School District of Rhinelander, business manager Marta Kwiatkowski said."

"Typically left out of the discussion is the single biggest thing affecting children and the quality of their education - their lives outside the classroom. Poverty, and a lack of support at home, harm a student's learning capability more than anything that occurs inside a school, yet politicians too often talk as if all outside societal problems can be overcome with quality instruction alone."

"Outreach workers who make home visits and provide services can help reduce truancy, records and interviews show. With rising rates of child poverty and homelessness contributing to the problem, sometimes the fix is as simple as an alarm clock or winter boots."

"For Donald Carter, the groundbreaking of an LGBT-friendly senior housing facility meant more than just the creation of a facility. It was the culmination of more than 40 years of activism."

"The usual rule is the higher the percentage of low-income children, who often start school behind, the lower the school's average test scores. Petrilli discovered useful secrets in the subcategories available under the No Child Left Behind law to those who look for them. There were several schools near his home with a minority of white kids like his and many low-income children. They all had passing rates in reading above 90 percent, the result of an easy state test that made it hard to differentiate between schools."

"For children born into poverty, the flood of missed days threatens to swallow any hope for a better life. For the Chicago Public Schools, the empty seats undermine efforts to boost achievement and cost the district millions in attendance-based funding."

"Casillas and Leslie Hahn, who coaches other teachers on instructional strategies, said they think their school's test scores will continue to rise, despite growing poverty in the west Riverside neighborhood. About 84 percent of students are from low income families, a figure that has risen about 10 percent since 2008, Casillas said."

"It's not because of lack of demand. I have long been a supporter of the president, and I continue to applaud many of his education initiatives, including his embrace of charter schools. But his administration's opposition to giving low-income families the full slate of educational options - captured when he zeroed out funding for the program in his budget this year, despite the earlier deal in which he agreed to reauthorizing it - is unacceptable."

"He noted that childhood poverty is extraordinarily high in Schenectady. Of four surveys collected by the American Community Survey in the past two years, three estimate a childhood poverty rate of 36 percent to 39 percent. The other survey -- the most recent of the four but the one with the smallest sample group -- estimated Schenectady's childhood poverty at a whopping 50 percent."

"A shift toward economic affirmative action would represent an enormous change in university admissions. Although many colleges claim to provide a boost to low-income applicants, as they do for minorities, data show that most selective colleges and universities may not. In 2005, William Bowen and his colleagues found that being black or Latino increased one's chances of admissions by 28 percentage points but that being low-income increased one's chances not at all."

"While we agree that poverty creates numerous obstacles to student learning, we see proof points in classrooms every day that tell us we don't need to wait to eradicate poverty to give every child a great education."