This study examined the roles and responsibilities of family liaisons working in urban schools with enrollments characterized by high poverty, high mobility, and ethnic diversity. Results indicated that the major responsibilities of the liaisons were creating a trusting and welcoming environment, facilitating parent involvement in the school,…

School counselors are critical intermediaries in K-12 schools who can help students from undocumented immigrant families persist in school. Yet, a dearth of research exists about their advocacy work, or the range of efforts they make to support unauthorized youth. This paper asks, (1) what challenges do counselors face and strive to overcome to…

Currently, around one in five children in the United Kingdom and the United States live in poverty. This has a devastating effect on their wellbeing, education and broader socio-political participation, and life chances. In this paper, Scottish policy documentary data are used to discuss the effects of relations amongst categories of children in…

The present paper contains a research into the issue of employment and legal safeguarding of social protection of young individuals suffering from cognitive disorders in Ukraine. The importance of legislative guarantees of equal rights and possibilities for such category of individuals, in comparison with all other members of the society, in…

Poverty simulations are a promising approach to engaging college students in learning about poverty because they provide direct experience with this critical social issue. Much of the extant scholarship on simulations describe them as experiential learning; however, it appears that educators do not examine biases, assumptions, and traditions of…

Growing up in a poor, dysfunctional family in a violent inner-city neighborhood, Jackson faced daily challenges even getting to the bus stop without being attacked by gang members. When he was bused to a white suburban school in 5th grade, things got even worse. Every black student who was bused in from his neighborhood was placed in remedial…

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the music educational program of El Sistema Sweden is advertised and legitimized through moving images. The films are a major part of the information on the Swedish national website of El Sistema and are supposed to contribute to the picture that the organization and its founders wish to market. The use…

Leveraging data from two nationally representative cohorts from the ECLS-K (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten), we examine the types of transition practices that schools use to ease children's adjustment to formal schooling. The transition to kindergarten is a critical juncture in a child's life that entails a host of social,…

Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be partly due to a neglect of practice in decoding letters. Visual stimuli are best learned symbol by symbol, with pattern analogies and much practice to unite smaller components and speed up identification. The prerequisite for comprehending volumes of text…

This report looks at student achievement levels in Arkansas school districts disaggregated by district poverty and by the district's performance relative to other districts. We estimated district performance statistics by subject and grade level (4, 8, and 11-12) for longitudinal student cohorts, using statistical models that adjusted for district…

Public discussion leading up to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015 focused on the controversial testing, standards, and teacher evaluation provisions of the previous reauthorization, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; 2002), and its…

Should babies sleep alone in cribs, or in bed with parents? Is talking to babies useful, or a waste of time? "A World of Babies" provides different answers to these and countless other child-rearing questions, precisely because diverse communities around the world hold drastically different beliefs about parenting. While celebrating that…

The Families of Merit Program was designed as an adult education course that could build individual self-efficacy and parental self-efficacy to effect outcomes that would benefit their child and the school. Building this self-efficacy in a community where those children served are predominately in poverty presents a compounded challenge. The…

The purpose of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and Head Start Collaborative programs is to share the responsibility for closing the achievement gap between economically-disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers. HISD collaborates with the following four Head Start agencies: AVANCE-Houston, Inc. (AVANCE), Gulf Coast…

Decades of federal economic policies that have concentrated poverty into isolated communities have devastated urban education, and expose youth and families to high stress and trauma. Disproportionately negative outcomes for students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged can be understood as manifestations of negative racial school…