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"A plan to provide taxpayer money for low-income children to attend private schools cleared a significant hurdle Tuesday after hours of arguments about parental choice and the impact on public schools. The 27-21 vote in the House Education Committee was a significant victory for lawmakers who support what they call opportunity scholarships,' operators of private and religious schools, and parents who want to remove their children from public schools. Supporters have been working for years on a way to provide tuition assistance for K-12 parents through vouchers or tax credits."

"The program, which puts children from low-income homes into preschool classrooms in the name of school readiness, has been slashed nationally. That's because of the sequester - the automatic spending cuts agreed to last year after a Congressional deadlock on the budget."

"This is the way to fund schools: simple, transparent and cognizant of the fact that disadvantaged students -- who make up 60% of the public school population -- are more expensive to educate, through no fault of their own. Every student in the state must have a safe place to attend school, and the schools of low-income students are more likely to be located in dangerous neighborhoods."

"A recent Tribune analysis showed that many of Illinois' wealthiest school districts like New Trier Township High School District, Winnetka District 36 and Wilmette District 39 have seen a significant increase since 2006 in the amount of poverty dollars used to help disadvantaged children. That rise has occurred even as some of the state's poorest schools are seeing their own allotments reduced."

"According to new poverty measures from the Census Bureau, 15 percent of people ages 65 or older nationwide are living in poverty 6 percent higher than previously thought."

"Poverty rate is the biggest factor, I believe, that impacts graduation rates,' said Kewanee District 229 Superintendent Christopher Sullens. There's a lot of reasons for that. Students in low-income families don't always have the resources to help them out at night or provide extra services, and so it falls on the school to do.'"

"Senate Appropriations Chairman Luke Kenley said he and other GOP legislative leaders have 'lost confidence' in the accuracy of the federal school lunch program as an indicator of poverty. There's no accountability in the federal program,' Kenley said."

"In the Philadelphia area, teachers see themselves as first responders in the ongoing emergency of poverty. Many say that if they falter, they fail the children."

"Those recommendations tie in well with another recent report, by Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner, that suggested ways to get high-achieving, low-income students to attend elite schools that might serve them better; research by Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale found that the economic benefit of selective schools is greatest for poor students. The work follows up on research Hoxby and Christopher Avery did showing that elite colleges frequently miss on high-achieving, low-income students."

"A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the Census Bureau's poverty estimates for seniors is frightening. Nationally, 9 percent of people 65 and older live in poverty. But when the poverty measure adds in other supplemental information, such as out-of-pocket medical costs or the high costs of housing, 15 percent of seniors are living in poverty."

"Higher education today, the report says, is stratified between four-year colleges with high graduation rates that serve largely affluent students and community colleges with often dismal graduation rates that serve mostly low-income students."

"For the last 10 years, the College Success FoundationTacoma a public-private organization has assisted promising low-income students by providing them with the mentoring and counseling they need to negotiate the college application process. It also helps them locate scholarships, and then continues mentoring and counseling them until they've completed their college degree. Careful research has documented its success in getting disadvantaged students into and out of college."