Among the 50 states, 44 use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment to identify low-income students. These data are also commonly used to allocate federal, state, and local funding to schools serving low-income children. School and district poverty rates, as determined by free and reduced-price lunch enrollment, additionally feature prominently in…

Higher education increases the likelihood of a healthy and successful life. This study investigated the association between relative deprivation and aspiration for college education in adolescents in Japan. The data of the 2016 survey of the Longitudinal Survey of Newborns in the twenty-first Century, a nationwide birth cohort study following…

Rurality in education research is a function of the size of the school, the distance of a school in relation to urban areas, and factors within each school that may differentiate the school community based on geography. Distance matters. This study finds variation between rural communities at different distances from an urban center and…

Data on attaining indicators of early speech, language, and literacy development, notably phonological awareness, among children with visual impairments (VI) are limited. This U.S. study utilized the "National Survey of Children's Health" (NSCH), 2016-2020, to observe the distinctive population of children with VI and speech, language,…

In a high school classroom, there are many factors that may influence academic achievement. One such factor may be due to the grit of individual learners. While much of the literature related to grit is focused on deficit ideological elements, structural elements, which are often overlooked, may also be present and could impact a student's ability…

Brain age, a measure of biological aging in the brain, has been linked to psychiatric illness, principally in adult populations. Components of socioeconomic status (SES) associate with differences in brain structure and psychiatric risk across the lifespan. This study aimed to investigate the influence of SES on brain aging in childhood and…

This study examines whether family income in early childhood is related to achievements of Israeli students in standardized tests at primary school. We analyzed data from the Israeli censuses of 1995 and 2008, which include information on family income and socio-economic background of children along with data pertaining to their achievements in…

Using the updated data from the 2016 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, this study examines the role of education in the livelihood of households in the Northwest region, the poorest region in Vietnam. Our micro-econometric analysis shows that education has a positive effect on choosing better livelihoods, household income and poverty…

Most researchers and policymakers rely on the share of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals when describing student socioeconomic background in schools. But shares of students receiving free and reduced-price meals, and other measures related to the distribution of school meals, vary by state and across time because of changes in…

The COVID-19 pandemic substantially affected the lives of mothers. This study seeks to investigate the stress that mothers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and their self-efficacy as parents in managing the impact of the disease. The study gathered longitudinal data from 603 German mothers (M[subscript age] = 40.5 years) with children…

A major challenge when contextualising admissions to university, or recruitment for jobs, is access to high quality information on a young person's background, to identify those who should benefit. Granular and verifiable information about prospective students' socio-economic background is, in practice, limited. As a consequence, universities and…

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from a one-time relaxation of household liquidity constraints (Field et al., 2013),…

Free and reduced-price meal eligibility (FRM) is commonly used in education research and policy applications as an indicator of student poverty. However, using multiple data sources external to the school system, we show that FRM status is a poor proxy for poverty, with eligibility rates far exceeding what would be expected based on stated income…

A child's home environment has been shown to be related to the development of early numeracy skills in some countries. However, significant relationships between home learning environment and math achievement have not consistently been found, and likely vary across different cultural and socio-political contexts. Here we explored the home…

Policy debates about whether wages and benefits from work provide enough resources to achieve economic self- sufficiency rely on data for workers, not working families. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that almost two- thirds of families working full time earn enough to cover a basic family budget, but that less than a…