Michigan policymakers and advocates are calling on the state to adopt a new school funding formula that provides additional funding to students with greater educational need, such as students with greater economic need. For Michigan students who have been identified as economically disadvantaged, at least a 35 percent weight is necessary for…

The observed increase in economic inequality, where the major concern is relative to the huge growth of the highest incomes, motivates to revisit classical measures of inequality and to offer new ways to synthesize the variability of the entire income distribution. The idea is to provide policy makers a way to contrast the economic position of the…

Tennessee has long recognized the importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) that children receive prior to school entry. Access to high-quality early teaching and learning contributes to the Tennessee Department of Education's (TDOE) goal that all children become successful readers by third grade, and moreover, better prepares…

Making college accessible to all includes making it affordable to lower-income families. A growing policy strategy at the state level is to provide individual students with need-based financial aid to offset tuition and living expenses. This strategy inherently presents challenges in choosing which income levels are eligible to receive aid,…

The Council on Postsecondary Education (Council) is charged with guiding the reform efforts envisioned by state policy leaders in the Kentucky Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997 and is Kentucky's statewide postsecondary and adult education coordinating agency. To gain better insight into economic conditions and workforce trends,…

Social scientists have conceptualised poverty in multiple ways, with measurement approaches that seek to identify absolute, relative, subjective, and multi-dimensional poverty. The concept of poverty is central in the comparative education field, but has been empirically elusive in many large, international educational surveys: these studies have…

The word gap, or the language gap, can be traced back to Hart and Risley's 1995 seminal work on language practices in high- and low-income families, and it is one of the most widely cited explanations for why children from low-income, minority contexts underperform academically in contrast to their white, middle-income counterparts. Despite its…

The majority of students in Maryland spent at least a portion of the last school year learning virtually, from public prekindergarten through college. Throughout the year, jurisdictions made individual decisions to allow for a gradual return to in-person school in a variety of ways. Lessons learned from the earliest stages of the pandemic made it…

This fact sheet explores key sociodemographic characteristics of immigrant and native-born parents with children ages 0 to 4 and 5 to 10 in the United States. It draws from a broader analysis the Migration Policy Institute's (MPI's) National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy (NCIIP) conducted on immigrant and U.S.-born parents with children…

Since 2001, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has been working with Atlanta's Southside communities to transform high-poverty city neighborhoods and help low-income families and children succeed. While some progress is being made, the gap between Atlanta's haves and have-nots remains immense. This report -- which is a follow-up to Casey's…

Is income during children's earliest years a key determinant of long-term child and adult success in the longer run? The research to date, Christopher Wimer and Sharon Wolf write, suggests that it is. Wimer and Wolf review substantial descriptive evidence that income can enhance child development and later adult outcomes, and that it does so most…

In Maryland, one way children's wellbeing is measured is by looking at the data from the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA). While the data can illustrate how children perform on various indicators across literacy, math, social-emotional development and physical well-being, it's really a reflection of the "readiness" of Maryland…

Concerns about the breadth of the U.S. income distribution and limited intergenerational mobility have led to a focus on educational achievement gaps by socio-economic status (SES). Using intertemporally linked assessments from NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], TIMSS [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey], and…

Children under 18 years represent 23 percent of the population, but they comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Similarly, among children in middle childhood (age 6 through 11 years), 45 percent live in…

Children under 18 years represent 23 percent of the population, but they comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Among our oldest children--adolescents age 12 through 17 years--41 percent live in low-income…