Georgia

"Students will be required to work five days monthly in entry-level jobs to help finance their tuition, which averages about $1,000 a year at existing Cristo Rey schools across the country, Garrett said. Enrollment will be limited to children from families with low incomes below $35,000 for a family of four."

"Georgia's pre-kindergarten program will get a turn in the national spotlight this week when President Barack Obama uses Decatur as a backdrop to promote an education initiative to give low-income preschoolers an earlier start on their schooling."

"We are lucky enough to live in a country where we have the latitude to make choices in almost every arena of our lives. Yet when it comes to one of the most important aspects of a child's upbringing -- education -- parents are too often offered frustratingly few choices. Our broken public education system can leave low-income students and parents with no alternatives to find a quality education."

"Charter schools educate a smaller proportion of metro Atlanta's impoverished students than the public school systems in which those charters are located, a new analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows."

"School districts do this for about 7,100 students across metro Atlanta every day and take other measures to preserve the students' privacy and self-esteem. The reason: The students are homeless."

"The pattern is all too obvious and entirely too familiar: The schools with the lowest scores are all Title I schools -- that is, those with the most students living in poverty. The schools with the highest scores -- and four topped the state average in every subject in every grade -- are all non-Title I schools. The correlation between poverty and educational struggle is familiar everywhere. But it seems to be worse, and getting worse, here."