Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. University health and physical education programs have a unique opportunity to assist in childhood obesity prevention through service-learning programs. However, prior to the implementation of service-learning curricula, it is imperative to gain insight in the unique needs of the selected community. The purpose of this study was to understand a service-learning community through exploring parent, teacher, and student perceptions...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Prevention, Physical Education, Health Education, Focus Groups, Family Involvement,...
Many students of Mexican descent must learn how to be successful students. This study describes 5 students of Mexican descent from situationally marginalized lives who were a part of a support and retention scholarship program (College Assistance Migrant Program--CAMP). These case studies document how they perceived their learning and how they changed as students after their first college experience and involvement in CAMP. Through her involvement in CAMP, Laura, a high school dropout without a...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Mexican American Education, Mexican Americans, Dropouts, Success, Academic...
It is generally observed in the literature of school effectiveness research that there are two broadly categorized factors influencing pupil achievement. However, the results of the studies based on empirically collected data vary from country to country and from time to time. Premised on this inconsistency of results and gaps in knowledge of this field in Cambodian education, this study was conducted in order to examine the effect of pupil factor on their mathematics achievement. The data were...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Foreign Countries, Mathematics Tests, Student Interests, Mathematics Achievement,...
Disasters can be defined as catastrophic events that challenge the normal range of human coping ability. The technological/human-caused disaster, a classification of interest in this article, is attributable to human error or misjudgment. Lower socioeconomic status and race intersect in the heightened risk for technological/human-caused disasters among people of color. The experience of the Navajo with the uranium industry is argued to specifically be this type of a disaster with associated...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Hazardous Materials, Environmental Influences, Wastes, Technology, Quality of Life,...
This paper is an essay on the state of Australian education that frames new directions for educational research. It outlines three challenges faced by Australian educators: highly spatialised poverty with particularly strong mediating effects on primary school education; the need for intellectual and critical depth in pedagogy, with a focus in the upper primary and middle years; and the need to reinvent senior schooling to address emergent pathways from school to work and civic life. It offers...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Interdisciplinary Approach, Social Sciences, Educational...
As my playful title suggests, I am referring to the process where the statement, "send reinforcements; we're going to advance," is said to have become, "send three- and fourpence; we're going to a dance." This quotation springs to mind when asked to think about how research gets picked up and recommendations from research are implemented in schools. This paper draws on the professional experiences of the author who has held a variety of roles in schools and the system and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Research Utilization, Theory Practice Relationship, Foreign...
Dr. Robinson's proposed action plan will serve the needs of highly achieving gifted students. However, defining giftedness as high academic performance based on traditional assessment procedures could reverse the field's fledgling success in supporting culturally diverse gifted children and youth. Changing the focus of equity in gifted education to economic representation will not decrease educators' responsibility to understand the learning needs of racially, culturally, and linguistically...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Academically Gifted, Equal Education, Access to Education, Student...
Teaching children who are victims of Katrina is not a multicultural education issue per se. However, there are some intersections between the victims of Katrina and the educational responses to them, and some of the primary constituent groups and issues that multicultural education represents and intends to serve. These are children of color and poverty who are marginalized in schools relative to resource allocation, learning opportunity, and academic achievement. Unfortunately, the lessons...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Multicultural Education, Student Needs, Educationally Disadvantaged, Disadvantaged...
The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived effectiveness of leadership in a Missouri rural K-8 school with a high incidence of poverty that consistently met federal and state accountability mandates. The concepts of accountability as measured by student achievement, the unique educational needs of children from poverty, and the challenges of the rural school location were viewed through the lens of leadership. Ten practices of leadership that lead to consistent student achievement...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Case Studies, Rural Schools, Educational Needs, Mentors, Poverty, Academic...
The Rural Education Bureau of the New Mexico Public Education Department has established a program to address the special needs of schools and communities in the extensive rural areas of the state. High poverty rates, depopulation and a general lack of viable economic opportunity have marked rural New Mexico for decades. The program underway aims at establishing holistic community socioeconomic revitalization at the grass roots level with the schools playing a leading role. Initiatives include...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Economic Progress, Poverty, Foreign Countries, Rural Development, Community...
The percentage of variance in student achievement that is explained by student SES--"poverty's power rating," as some call it--tends to be less among smaller schools than among larger schools. Smaller schools, we are told, are able to somehow disrupt the association between SES and student achievement. Using eighth-grade data for 215 public schools in Maine, I explored the hypothesis that this finding is in part a statistical artifact of the lower reliability of school-aggregated...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Reading Achievement, Mathematics Achievement, Academic Achievement, School...
Part of a larger research project involving the study of mathematics achievement of middle and high school students in Tennessee, this report analyzes said achievement in terms of school locale and the percentage of disadvantaged (pdisadv) students enrolled in the school. Schools were designated as Rural, Large Central City, and Other Nonrural. Socioeconomic Status (SES) was determined by the percentage of students receiving federally subsidized free and reduced lunch. Schools were then placed...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Economically Disadvantaged, Mathematics Achievement, Rural Education, Poverty, Rural...
Schools in 47 high-poverty school districts located mostly along the Atlantic Coast of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia may have a head start on new requirements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, thanks to a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Begun in April 2000, the five-year Coastal Rural Systemic Initiative (CRSI) is striving to stimulate sustainable systemic improvements in science and mathematics education in school districts with a long...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Rural Schools, Poverty, Federal Legislation, Disadvantaged Youth, School Districts,...
School variables, such as school size and school location, matter. School size and location impact many areas of education, including the characteristics of the school, curriculum, and post-school outcomes. Research reveals that students in rural schools face many personal and education hardships--from living in poverty to having less opportunity and sophistication in technology. Rural schools also have fewer course offerings. While rural schools are a unique, urban and rural schools may be...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Urban Schools, Rural Schools, Poverty, School Size, School Location, Institutional...
The society is violent, the urban neighborhoods are violent, and the schools are violent. People who want to teach in urban schools need to recognize the reality of the situation they will enter. Beginning teachers must recognize that preventing violence is an integral part of their legitimate work; the more effective they are at empowering youngsters, the less violence they will engender; the less effective they are, the more violence they will cause. Beneath the surface and not very far...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Urban Schools, Neighborhoods, Urban Teaching, Violence, Teaching Conditions,...
This qualitative study explores the experiences of women administrators in high-poverty community schools, investigating four women's perspectives on work demands and the impact on their families. Their work demands are related to the characteristics of impoverished communities, whereas their work resources are based on intrinsic rewards and social justice. Family demands and resources are related to the developmental stages of families, and therefore vary among the women interviewed. The...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Community Schools, Poverty, Females, Social Justice, Developmental Stages, Women...
Noting that the failures of the U.S. health care system are compounding the problems faced by low-income Americans, Alan Weil argues that any strategy to reduce poverty must provide access to health care for all low-income families. Although nearly all children in families with incomes under 200 percent of poverty are eligible for either Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the parents of poor children often lack health insurance. Parents who leave welfare normally...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Low Income, Tax Credits, Dependents, Health Insurance, Access to Health...
Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills needed to earn a decent living in a rapidly changing economy. Murnane describes three initiatives that the federal government could take to improve the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Graduation Rate, Federal Legislation, School Choice, Program Effectiveness,...
Since the 1970s, the share of U.S. children growing up in single-parent families has doubled, a trend that has disproportionately affected disadvantaged families. Paul Amato and Rebecca Maynard argue that reversing that trend would reduce poverty in the short term and, perhaps more important, improve children's growth and development over the long term, thus reducing the likelihood that they would be poor when they grew up. The authors propose school and community programs to help prevent...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Divorce, Sex Education, Poverty, Marital Satisfaction, Economically Disadvantaged,...
In Mark Greenberg's view, a national child care strategy should pursue four goals. Every parent who needs child care to get or keep work should be able to afford care without having to leave children in unhealthy or dangerous environments; all families should be able to place their children in settings that foster education and healthy development; parental choice should be respected; and a set of good choices should be available. Attaining these goals, says Greenberg, requires revamping both...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Family Income, Tax Credits, Federal Government, Block Grants, Low Income...
Gordon Berlin discusses the nation's long struggle to reduce poverty in families with children, and proposes a counterintuitive solution--rewarding the work of individuals. He notes that policymakers' difficulty in reducing family poverty since 1973 is attributable to two intertwined problems--falling wages among low-skilled workers and the striking increase in children living with a lone parent, usually the mother. As the wages of men with a high school education or less began to decline,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Wages, Poverty, Taxes, Tax Credits, Family (Sociological Unit), Economically...
Greg Duncan, Jens Ludwig, and Katherine Magnuson explain how providing high-quality care to disadvantaged preschool children can help reduce poverty. In early childhood, they note, children's cognitive and socioemotional skills develop rapidly and are sensitive to "inputs" from parents, home learning environments, child care settings, and the health care system. The authors propose an intensive two-year, education-focused intervention for economically disadvantaged three- and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Human Capital, Public Policy, Early Childhood Education, Preschool Children,...
What do the half-century decline in U.S. marriage and the attendant rise in single parenthood mean for the economic well-being of children, especially children living in single-parent families? Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill show how differing living arrangements can be expected to affect families' economic well-being. Married-parent and cohabiting households, for example, can benefit from economies of scale and from having two adult earners. The availability of child support for single-parent...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Mothers, Family Income, Family (Sociological Unit), Interpersonal...
During the past century the U.S. family system has seen vast changes--in marriage and divorce rates, cohabitation, childbearing, sexual behavior, and women's work outside the home. Andrew Cherlin reviews these historic changes, noting that marriage remains the most common living arrangement for raising children, but that children, especially poor and minority children, are increasingly likely to grow up in single-parent families and to experience family instability. Cherlin describes the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Divorce, Marriage, Incidence, Marital Status, Parents, Attitude Change, Poverty,...
The authors examine black, white, and Hispanic children's differing experiences in early childhood care and education and explore links between these experiences and racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness. Children who attend center care or preschool programs enter school more ready to learn, but both the share of children enrolled in these programs and the quality of care they receive differ by race and ethnicity. Black children are more likely to attend preschool than white children, but...
Topics: ERIC Archive, African American Children, School Readiness, Learning Readiness, Poverty, Low Income,...
The authors describe various parenting behaviors, such as nurturance, discipline, teaching, and language use, and explain how researchers measure them. They note racial and ethnic variations in several behaviors. Most striking are differences in language use. Black and Hispanic mothers talk less with their young children than do white mothers and are less likely to read to them daily. They also note some differences in harshness. When researchers measuring school readiness gaps control for...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Behavior Problems, School Readiness, Discipline, Mothers, Child Rearing, Parent Child...
In the United States black women have for decades been twice as likely as white women to give birth to babies of low birth weight who are at elevated risk for developmental disabilities. Does the black-white disparity in low birth weight contribute to the racial disparity in readiness? The author summarizes the cognitive and behavioral problems that beset many low birth weight children and notes that not only are the problems greatest for the smallest babies, but black babies are two to three...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Prenatal Care, Medical Services, Body Weight, School Readiness, Early Intervention,...
To provide an array of perspectives about policies needed to serve the growing number of children of immigrant families in the U.S., experts across various organizations and backgrounds were asked to respond to this question: "How should policymakers, advocates, stakeholders, and practitioners respond strategically and proactively to demographic change and increasing diversity in order to promote the healthy development, productivity, and well-being of American children into the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Child Health, Immigrants, Helping Relationship, Productivity, Well Being, Federal...
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in "Brown v. Board of Education" that: "Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment--even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal." Even with a...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Economically Disadvantaged, American Indians, Asian Americans, Court...
A number of economic and labor market trends in the United States over the past 30 years affect the well-being of workers and their families. This article describes key changes taking place and the implications for social and economic policies designed to help low-income working families and their children, particularly those families that include immigrants. Important conclusions that emerge include the following: (1) Diversity--The workforce, like the population, is more diverse than in past...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Wages, Poverty, Economically Disadvantaged, Labor Market, Labor, Employed Parents,...
Several major demographic shifts over the past half-century have transformed who we are and how we live in this country in many ways. Most striking, however, is the fact that children today are much more likely to be members of ethnic or racial minority groups. Racial/ethnic minorities are destined, in aggregate, to become the numerical majority within the next few decades. This article presents a wide range of statistics reflecting cultural, family, social, economic, and housing circumstances...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Racial Differences, Socioeconomic Influences, Ethnicity, Poverty, Educational...
Background: The prevalence of obesity among children continues to rise. Individual-focused health education efforts have been minimally successful in producing the necessary changes to curb this epidemic. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between neighborhood characteristics, grocery store availability and accessibility, and parent-reported fruit and vegetable intake and/or weight status. Methods: Data was collected from 797 preadolescent children (ages 6-11)...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Eating Habits, Obesity, Preadolescents, Children, Food, Retailing, Poverty, Body...
Student teaching may require student teachers to address the demands of two masters that often have very different expectations and philosophies. They are caught in a bind of being expected to implement methods advocated in university coursework while also being expected to fit into the classroom to which they are assigned. This bind is further complicated by the tensions inherent in school reform efforts. As schools try to meet the needs of every child, they have adopted all manner of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Student Teaching, Student Teachers, Educational Environment, Academic Standards,...
This article argues that, although No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not presented as a jobs policy, the Act does function as a substitute for the creation of decently paying jobs for those who need them. Aimed particularly at the minority poor like its 1965 predecessor, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB acts as an anti-poverty program because it is based on an implicit assumption that increased educational achievement is the route out of poverty for low-income families and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Minimum Wage, Low Income Groups, Federal Legislation, Poverty, Economically...
Criticism of the public schools has been unrelenting since "A Nation at Risk" was published in 1983. From that pivotal moment to the present the business community has played a crucial role in setting the parameters of the critique of the schools and shaping the reform agendas that have been proposed and implemented. However, this author has found the criticisms of student achievement leveled by the business community to reveal tremendous ignorance of the complexity of schools, of the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, School Restructuring, Business, Educational Change, Scientific Research, School...
Studies suggest that three and four-year old children who are exposed to preschool have a greater chance of academic success throughout their schooling. This article highlights a five-year case study of children of poverty who attended a structured preschool in Salinas, California. The longitudinal study exposed various components of a successful preschool program. The study results indicate that children of poverty who attended preschool out performed in second and third grade a similar...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Preschool Education, Academic Achievement, Grade 3, Young Children, Success,...
Although teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States declined for ten straight years during the 1990s and were less than half of comparative figures from 1957, the year of the all-time high of teen pregnancy, nearly one in ten teenage young women still became pregnant in 2001, with half of these young women giving birth. Teen pregnancy statistics are particularly high for minority youth in poor and working class urban areas. Twenty-five percent of teen births occur to African-American...
Topics: ERIC Archive, African Americans, Urban Schools, Working Class, Public Schools, Poverty, Females,...
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 has increased emphasis on "closing the gap" between the achievement of African-American and disadvantaged children and that of their respective peers. Using the 2001 results of Kentucky's accountability tests (e.g., CTBS-5, KCCT), Chi-square analyses were performed to determine whether, when disaggregated by quartile (CTBS-5) or proficiency-level (KCCT), a significant difference existed for each school between the distributions of disadvantaged and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Federal Legislation, Disadvantaged Youth, Academic Achievement, School Size,...
While many efforts to reform high schools target large cities, a similar minority located at the fringes of American culture has been relatively overlooked. Low-income, rural students suffer many of the same social maladies--such as severe poverty and widespread drug abuse--as urban minority children, and they are comparably disadvantaged when it comes to college access. These students endure geographic and cultural isolation as well as the fallout from stagnant local economies. Most of the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Higher Education, High Schools, School Restructuring, Income, Cultural Isolation,...
Research studies on school success often focus on the impact of discrete elements such as race, culture, ethnicity, gender, language, or school location on high achievement. The condition of poverty, however, may be the most important of all student differences in relation to high achievement; although not all schools have racial diversity, nearly all schools have at least some students living in poverty. In this paper, the authors review the literature on poverty, including its relationship...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Ethnicity, Racial Factors, Poverty, High Achievement, Place of Residence,...
Over the last three decades 45 states have been confronted with school finance lawsuits. This phenomenon has led to a proliferation of school funding equity studies. However, to date, most studies of the equity of state school finance systems have focused on differences in expenditures between school districts. More recent research has found evidence that this approach overlooks important allocation decisions made at the district level, thus failing to identify continuing inequity. The few...
Topics: ERIC Archive, State Schools, Poverty, Educational Finance, Disadvantaged Youth, School Districts,...
In this project, we used photo-interviews as a method to investigate the hopes and fears of urban adolescent girls who actively participated in their community organization. The photo-interviews were featured in a collaborative, creative arts program involving urban adolescent girls from a community organization and college students enrolled in a research methods course. Case studies of four adolescent participants are presented, illustrating the role of neighborhood context and past...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Methods Courses, Poverty, At Risk Persons, Females, Community Programs, Urban Areas,...
Are magnet schools in a position to meet diversity ideals? As districts are declared unitary and released from court ordered desegregation, many are framing their commitments to fairness and equity in terms of diversity--i.e., comparable rates of participation and comparable educational outcomes in all segments the student population. In this study, the enrollment statistics for magnet and contiguous non-magnet public schools in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a large, urban district that had...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Urban Schools, Public Schools, Magnet Schools, Outcomes of Education, Enrollment...
The proportion of variance in student achievement that is explained by student SES--"poverty's power rating," as some call it--tends to be lower among smaller schools than among larger schools. Smaller schools, many claim, are able to somehow disrupt the seemingly axiomatic association between SES and student achievement. Using eighth-grade data for 216 public schools in Maine, I explored the hypothesis that this in part is a statistical artifact of the greater volatility (lower...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Reading Achievement, Mathematics Achievement, School Size, Socioeconomic...
This study evaluated benefits of a preventive intervention to the living standards of recently separated mothers. In the Oregon Divorce Study's randomized experimental design, data were collected 5 times over 30 months and evaluated with Hierarchical Linear Growth Models. Relative to their no-intervention control counterparts, experimental mothers had greater improvements in gross annual income, discretionary annual income, poverty threshold, income-to-needs ratios, and financial stress....
Topics: ERIC Archive, Divorce, Intervention, Poverty, Mothers, Disadvantaged, Living Standards, Depression...
Distance education in Brazil has evolved more slowly than distance education offerings in other developing countries. This is because all aspects of Brazil's publicly-funded educational system are excessively regulated, highly bureaucratic, and tightly centralized. Such highly centralized bureaucracy and strict control has resulted in tremendous hurdles that work to thwart the adoption, provision, and diffusion of distance education. This is not good news: Like many developing countries, Brazil...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Open Universities, Distance Education, Population Distribution, Global...
In addressing the issue of educational inequality and achievement gap, this research article demonstrates that critical implications could be gleaned from listening to the authentic voices of students by using a social justice lens. A social justice perspective in educational leadership is essential in evaluating the impact of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, and disability on the educational outcomes of students in urban schools. (Contains 2 tables.)
Topics: ERIC Archive, Social Justice, Urban Schools, Equal Education, Educational Objectives, Outcomes of...
Recognition of poverty and neglect is very important in formulating a practical diagnosis of children's and adolescent's learning disorders. Early brain development forms the basis of learning, behavior and health over the entire life span. Through accumulated stressors and lack of supports, early poverty undermines competent parenting which then impairs learning and is the most common cause of mild mental retardation (MMR). Parenting interventions left until school entry do not prevent the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Child Neglect, Mild Mental Retardation, Learning Disabilities, Children,...
A hallmark of school library media best practice is for the library media center to be open and accessible to patron use before, during, and after the school day and throughout the entire school year. Anecdotal evidence and informal discussion among school library media specialists indicate that library media facilities are sometimes used for activities unrelated to the mission of the school library media program in the school. These activities may close the library media center to regular...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Poverty, Standardized Tests, School Libraries, Media Specialists, Library Services,...
This study focused on a concept entitled shared ethnography. The researcher and youth participants share race in common. Critical Race Theory was used to analyze the reflective journal. An after school science program in a high poverty urban environment provided the context for this study. The findings of the study suggested that when researcher and subject share race in common, the researcher has a distinct insight into the subjects' experiences and that the subjects reveal more about their...
Topics: ERIC Archive, African American Students, Hispanic American Students, Science Programs, Ethnography,...