Giving Compass' Take:

· Michael J. Petrilli addresses the relationship between students' socioeconomic status and their academic outcomes, and explains how reducing poverty and improving a child's home life has a positive impact on their success at school. 

· How can donors support the expansion of outreach services for students and help with the fight against poverty and homelessness? 

· Check out this article to see how one high-poverty district employed a six-step process to boost student success.

It’s long been understood that, on average, there’s a strong relationship between a child’s socioeconomic status and his or her academic outcomes. It’s also the case that when poor families become less poor—either because of more “market income” or due to social programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit—their children tend to do better in school. That’s not surprising, given that kids only spend approximately 9 percent of their first eighteen years of life in school. So it stands to reason that improved economic conditions for lots of children should be associated with improved results on achievement tests. Is that what we were seeing before the Great Recession struck?

To find out, we’ll start by charting the supplemental child poverty rate against the “below basic rate” for the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading. Both measures are dichotomous—you’re either above or below the line in each case. And we want both of these rates to decline over time.

Helping families escape poverty is not the only goal we might have for social policy. We’d also love to see significant upward mobility into the middle class and beyond. Likewise, moving students to NAEP basic isn’t nearly enough if we want children to be on track for college and career. “Proficiency” is still the gold standard.

Read the full article about poverty and student success by Michael J. Petrilli at Education Next.