Latest Coverage

"For months, the leadership of Wake County's business and education establishment has watched with alarm as a new school board assembled a student assignment policy that could lead to high-poverty schools in Southeast Raleigh."

"All of us want to help low-income kids. Readers say Rhee is too aggressive and uncompromising. I say other school leaders have been similarly pushy, with good results in raising standards, removing low-performing teachers and fighting the apathy..."

"But those wonderful success stories are the exceptions that prove the rule that the effects of poverty -- especially the multigenerational poverty that we see in so many of Alexandria's schools -- cannot be overcome by schools alone."

"With a few bucks in his pocket, the clothes on his back and a backpack full of books, Enrique Rosado began his fall semester at the University of Tampa with a real-life lesson in survival."

"The number of former workers seeking Social Security disability benefits has spiked with the nation's economic problems, heightening concern that the jobless are expanding the program beyond its intended purpose of aiding the disabled."

"That many children eating school breakfast is rare. Although the number of hungry children in the U.S. is rising, fewer than half of the kids who could be eating a free or low-cost breakfast at school are getting one."

"Ninety-four percent of Lake Forest's 463 students are African-American, and almost 85 percent are low-income, qualifying them for free or reduced-price lunches."

"The problem is especially acute, experts say, in districts that serve lower-income students. As a result, teachers are forced to spend much of the first weeks of school bringing students back up to speed instead of moving them forward."

"Was Rhee naive to think she could, as critics charged from day one? No doubt. How else to explain her admission that she is just now learning that school reform -- using education to empower poor black students -- would be viewed by some as a 'radical concept'?"

"Hundreds of Bay State children are being shut out of the federal low-income Head Start program this fall as wait lists grow and state and federal budgets fail to keep up with the rising demand amid the dismal economy, a Herald review has found."

"The number of children living with their grandparents has risen throughout the past decade and jumped sharply during the recession, according to a new analysis of census data. One child in 10 now lives with a grandparent, the Pew Research Center reported this week."

"The Girls Club was founded in 1996, largely to give girls from low-income families some entrepreneurial skills and a grounding in healthy living. But in recent months, the club has taken a turn for the technical."