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"As the executive director of the Iowa Business and Education Roundtable has said, if across-nation comparisons of school performance were normalized for poverty, the U.S. would do as well in educational outcomes as Finland famously does. This begs the question: Wouldn't a war on poverty (or attention to home social support) be more important factors for improving educational outcomes?"

"One study of the Harvard initiative's first year found that the number of students whose family income fell below the threshold increased by only about 15 students in a class of about 1,650 freshmen. Officials at Harvard and other colleges with similar offers lament that there is not a large enough pool of high-achieving low-income students and that there's not much colleges can do to change that."

"More than 300 of Virginia's best and brightest college graduates are on today's front lines of bringing quality education to disadvantaged students, teaching in hard-to-staff schools as part of the innovative Teach for America (TFA) program. That none of these teachers is in a classroom in the commonwealth is due to the state's antiquated mode of teacher certification."

"A state agency wants $2 million more for loans to attract aspiring teachers to work in South Carolina's neediest schools. But, as more state schools are deemed needy, some education officials are asking whether the teachers who get the state loans are going to the schools that need them most."

"The state offered a one-time chunk of money to counties to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables for low-income seniors instead of using a voucher system that has not worked well in the past."

"Low-income Wayne County residents age 60 and older who qualify can receive a free monthly box of supplemental food by pre-registering at one of two sessions this coming week. The Richmond Senior Community Center, in partnership with Gleaners Community Food Program, RSVP and the Area 9 In-Home & Community Services Agency, is starting this month to offer the Community Supplemental Food Program that serves low-income seniors."

"If the Iowa City Community School District passes the proposed plan to diversify schools, it will join more than 80 districts across the nation that have responded to research on student achievement by giving more students the chance to attend mixed-income schools. Research shows that while students' own socioeconomic backgrounds have a big effect on their achievement, so do the socioeconomic backgrounds of their peers. Numerous sources - including the famous 1966 Coleman Report, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and a 2010 meta-analysis by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte - show that poor students at mixed-income schools do better than poor students at high-poverty schools."

"This entire testing mania came about because children from poverty were not succeeding in school as well as middle-class children. So, without research or analysis, politicians decided that the problem was teachers. They decided that if we test the children and publish the scores, it will shame teachers into doing a better job and prompt the public to demand better. For a decade now we have tried it, and it hasn't worked. The gap between kids from poverty and the middle class remains, but the aftermath has been disastrous."

"Teachers who got bad-performance ratings in the past school year were likelier to be teaching in high-poverty schools or in schools with high percentages of black, Hispanic or low-achieving students, a new analysis found. The StudentsFirstNY report on the roughly 3 percent of teachers who were rated unsatisfactory' - known as a U-rating' - for the 2011-12 school year found that they were distributed unequally throughout the system."

"LePage's first two-year budget, introduced two years ago, targeted the state's welfare programs more heavily. It allowed the state to cut off food stamps, or TANF benefits, to drug felons convicted within the past 20 years who failed a series of drug tests. The state, however, hasn't implemented that provision of the budget, citing potential implementation costs and the potential that courts won't allow drug testing as a condition for receiving welfare benefits. Apart from the budget proposal, the LePage administration is proposing to prohibit convicted drug felons from receiving TANF benefits."

"None should be able to sleep at night knowing that high-poverty schools, which employ 45% of the city's teachers, are stuck with 54% of the instructors who received unsatisfactory ratings in the 2011-12 school year. At low-poverty schools, where 15% of the teaching force works, just 7% got U ratings last year."

"Poverty among schoolchildren in Kansas and Missouri is on the rise, according to statistics from the National School Lunch Program. Administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the program tracks student eligibility for free or reduced-priced meals offered to low-income families."