In "School Communities of Strength," Peter W. Cookson, Jr., lays out a blueprint for providing equitable educational opportunities for students from all socioeconomic strata, and particularly for the five million American children who live with the extreme material hardship known as deep poverty. This work issues an urgent call to action…

Families who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children's development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in…

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) serves as the foundation of America's national nutrition safety net. It is the nation's first line of defense against food insecurity and offers a powerful tool to improve nutrition among low-income individuals. SNAP is the largest of the 15 domestic food and nutrition assistance programs…

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are long-standing policies that link cash assistance to low-income families to work effort. A new policy being tested in New York City adopts this "conditional cash transfer" principle and extends it to a broader set of family efforts to build their…

Nearly half of the nation's families with young children struggle to make ends meet. A new KIDS COUNT policy report makes the case for creating opportunity for families by addressing the needs of parents and their children simultaneously. "Creating Opportunity for Families: A Two-Generation Approach" describes a new approach to reducing…

Although a vast amount of literature on the characteristics of public assistance recipients exists, little is known about the characteristics of the clientele of nonprofits that provide material assistance. This study examines the question of who receives material assistance from nonprofits. Three panels of the Survey of Income and Program…

In September 2000, building upon a decade of major United Nations conferences and summits, world leaders came together at United Nations Headquarters in New York to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets--with a…

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have two main objectives: reducing poverty and increasing the human capital of children. To reach these objectives, transfers are given to poor households conditioned on investments in their children's education, health, and nutrition. Targeting mechanisms used by CCTs have been generally successful in…

Opportunity NYC-Family Rewards, an experimental, privately funded, conditional cash transfer (CCT) program to help families break the cycle of poverty, was the first comprehensive CCT program in a developed country. Launched in 2007 by New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), Family Rewards offered cash assistance to low-income…

This document presents 2010 data from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The SAIPE program produces poverty estimates for the total population and median household income estimates annually for all counties and states. SAIPE data also produces single-year poverty estimates for the school-age…

This paper presents a multi-pronged strategy for reducing poverty and unemployment by increasing the number of jobs for unskilled workers and raising their wages. The first component of this strategy is a marginal hours employment tax credit, similar to the recently enacted New Jobs Tax Credit. This would serve to generate an expansion in…

Poverty is an important antecedent factor affecting education. One of the most striking characteristics of rural poverty is the extent to which the rural poor work. About 65% of poor nonmetro families have at least one worker, compared to 54% of poor metro families. This report focuses on federal and state policy reforms that would assure poor…

The study attempts to evaluate the efficiency of two types of alternative programs aimed at increasing the incomes of poor families. It deals with programs involving education and training as well as those which represent direct measures for increasing family income. In order to compare such programs, a common measure of efficiency is needed. The…

Focuses on three income support programs: unemployment insurance, public assistance, and food stamps, and examines the extent to which low income groups, particularly blacks, participated in these programs, the factors responsible for the nonparticipation of many poor, and the adequacy of support provided to participants in these programs.…

This paper assesses the nature and extent of poverty in the USSR in the post-Stalin period, primarily in the decade after 1958. The author describes Soviet anti-poverty policies and discusses their impact. He notes that the Soviet government's ability to influence economic welfare and income distribution lies in its control over wage and salary…