Iowa

"The reasons low-income children sometimes perform worse on exams aren't totally clear, even to administrators and researchers who study the issue, said Pam Ehly, the Iowa City Community School District's instruction director. It's difficult to pinpoint what the reason is - you can look at correlates like if they didn't engage in preschool, that's a factor. If you don't have funds as a family for additional opportunities like going to a museum or having books at home, those factors become compounded and it has an effect,' she said."

"Iowa House lawmakers voted Monday to expand a tax credit for Iowans who give money for scholarships for low-income children to attend private schools. The School Tuition Organization Tax Credit has been around since 2006, and currently offers a maximum of $8.75 million in tax credits for scholarship donors."

"If children are prepared at home and in the community they are more likely to arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed. But if children are exposed to poverty and neglect they are more likely to remain behind their peers, and their chances are greater of having difficulty as they become adults who want to participate in the workforce, he said."

"This is not an attack on teachers. I am criticizing policymakers who continue to demand increased teacher education and licensure requirements centered on disciplinary mastery. A foundational element of teacher education must be improving pre-service teachers' critical thinking skills so teachers have the ability to understand society and the institutions in which they teach in order to better serve our low income and racial/ethnic minority students."

"In the month since the Iowa City Community School Board passed a first reading of its proposed diversity policy, controversy about the document has swirled. The policy is meant to eliminate vast disparities in poverty rates across the district, which range from 6 percent in one school to 79 percent in another, by establishing ranges between which a school's poverty rate would have to fall. While many community members say something should be done about socioeconomic disparities and the academic gaps they create, stakeholders have disagreed fiercely about whether the current proposal is the appropriate way to do that."

"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?"