The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the second largest federally subsidized food assistance program, serving approximately 31 million lunches each day. Nearly all public and private schools offer the federally reimbursed school meals program, which cost the federal government $9.3 billion to operate in 2008. This Issue Brief highlights the…

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding…

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project…

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of learner-centered education in conveying the message to change participants' fruit and vegetable consumption. Design: Focus groups were conducted with sites participating in the Finding the Teacher Within (FTW) program and comparison sites 4-6 months after participants attended the Special Supplemental…

The SpringBoard Bursary Foundation (SpringBoard) commissioned the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) to undertake an evaluation of its activities and impacts between 2013 and 2018. This interim and summary report presents the findings of the first year of the evaluation. SpringBoard was established in 2012 to transform the lives of…

"Child Care Helps America Work and Learn" is a new publication produced by the Child Care Bureau. This new series will highlight some of the many Recovery Act-funded child care success stories from communities across the country that illustrate how the Bureau is working toward the shared goal of supporting children and families. This…

Service learning and civic engagement are playing an increasingly larger role in higher education. Unity College's Hunger at Home course could serve as a model for service learning in disciplines such as nutrition, sociology, and food and agriculture. The class worked with local partners to get a better understanding of hunger in the area, recent…

In Paraguay conditions for rural children living in poverty are often difficult. At least 14% of children age 5 years and younger show moderate to severe physical stunting (UNICEF 2009). More than half of the children in primary school have repeated at least one grade by the time they complete the sixth grade. Rural families living in poverty, who…

Despite more than 40 years of legislation to improve the outcomes of children and youth with disabilities and those growing up in poverty, vast numbers of adults with severe disabilities are unemployed or underemployed and living in poverty. This article suggests that one of the factors maintaining the problem is our failure to acknowledge the…

The Rural Studio, an outreach program of Auburn University, designs innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's Hale County by using "junk" such as car windshields, carpet tiles, baled cardboard, and old license plates. The article theorizes this particular architecture in terms of Critical Regionalism, developed by…

The use of case studies in college courses can increase student engagement with the subject matter and improve analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills. Case studies were introduced in a relatively large (54 students) undergraduate world food and population course at Colorado State University in the spring semester of 2008 and…

New Hope, an employment-based poverty-reduction intervention for adults evaluated in a random-assignment experimental design, had positive impacts on children's achievement and social behavior two and five years after random assignment. The question addressed in this paper was the following: Did the positive effects of New Hope on younger children…

Because of the present, increasing economic circumstances, poverty is fast becoming a crisis, and teacher preparation programs must begin to prepare teachers to explicitly address the needs of poor children. The inclusion of poverty in this discourse is in no way intended to discount the issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. The intention here is…

One of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, Bangladesh has faced many challenges during its almost 40-year history as an independent nation. Yet the country has recently made substantial progress in improving young children's survival and protection. It now provides health care, nutrition, immunization, and education…

UNESCO formed the concept of fundamental education in hopes that the programme could end poverty, bring world peace and serve indigenous people. When UNESCO's first pilot project appeared to fail, the organisation developed centres where fundamental education workers learned to use such techniques as libraries, museum displays, films and radio,…