For poor families, the possession of assets--savings accounts, homes, and the like--has the potential not only to relieve some of the stress of living in poverty but also to make a better future seem like a real possibility. If children in families that own certain assets fare better than children in families without them, then helping poor…

Today's children are our nation's hope for building a strong future economy and thriving society. One of the key milestones on the path to success is learning to read in the early grades. As documented in the Casey Foundation's reports "Early Warning: Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters" and "Early Warning Confirmed,"…

The percentage of public school students qualifying for free or reduced price meals has increased from about 33 percent to nearly 50 percent over the past 15 years. Kansas uses the number of students eligible for free (but not reduced-price) lunch to determine the amount of funding school districts receive to provide for services to at-risk…

The Roadmap of Need is an in-depth needs assessment for North Carolina youth, produced annually by the Public School Forum of North Carolina's Center for Afterschool Programs (NC CAP). This publication examines 20 indicators of wellness in counties across North Carolina. These indicators contain relevant annual data demonstrating need across North…

Defining the poverty line has been acknowledged as being highly variable by the majority of published literature. Despite long discussions and successes, poverty line has a number of problems due to its arbitrary nature. This paper proposes three measurements of poverty lines using membership functions based on fuzzy set theory. The three…

America's great public universities were founded with the highest expectations of academic excellence and service to their states. Overall, these institutions, often called the "flagship universities," do a poor job of ensuring that undergraduate students engage in an intellectually vibrant campus culture and leave with a solid…

The U.S. has a core constitutional and founding commitment to equality of opportunity for all citizens. Whether viewed as an end in itself or a means to fostering increased national achievement and competitiveness, the 21st century United States conversation about equity reflects a national consensus about the many benefits of and necessity for…

In the 2014 study, "Interactive Online Learning on Campus: Testing MOOCs and Other Platforms in Hybrid Formats in the University System of Maryland," researchers examined the impact of using hybrid forms of interactive online learning in seven undergraduate courses across seven universities in Maryland. Hybrid forms of interactive online…

Rising college prices, stagnating incomes, and diminished asset values have led to the widespread perception that college is "unaffordable" for more and more people. The role of student aid in reducing the prices many students pay is too complex to be widely understood, and in spite of increasing enrollment rates, most people do not question the…

The majority of Southern states performed below the national average and the average of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in terms of the percent of young adults in 2015 who attained an associate degree or higher. This regional profile presents a synthesis of trends in the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB)…

The 17th edition of "The State of Preschool," the National Institute for Early Education Research's (NIEER) report on their annual survey of state preschool policies, provides government policymakers valuable information for planning short- and long-term responses to the crisis. The report includes information for every state on child…

ACTA's 12th state higher education report examines questions of great urgency for the state of Mississippi: How should individual public universities choose their leadership? Are the public universities careful stewards of taxpayer dollars? Is free speech protected on Mississippi's college campuses? The report assesses institutions on measures of…

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and…

On the weekend before the Fourth of July 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a 737-page report that summarized one of the most comprehensive studies of American education ever conducted. Encompassing some 3,000 schools, nearly 600,000 students, and thousands of teachers, and produced by a team led by Johns Hopkins University…

The State University System of Florida has developed three tools that aid in guiding the System's future: (1) The Board of Governors' 2025 System Strategic Plan is driven by goals and associated metrics that stake out where the System is headed; (2) The Board's Annual Accountability Report provides yearly tracking for how the System is progressing…