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Mean: 41.67
Median: 40
Mode: 40
Standard Deviation: 17.37

We think the mean is the best representation of our collected data. The median and mode are also good representations, but the mean is a little bit more. There are more numbers above 40, so 41.67 leans more toward these larger numbers, therefore the mean is the best representation.

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World Vision in an organization that is working against poverty in America, focusing on areas with high child poverty. As a Christian organization, they advocate for Christian values of caring for the poor and oppressed. World Vision helps through awareness, programs, funding, and partnerships with local organizations. They additionally help when natural disaster strike, leaving many more people in poverty than before. Education is also part of their program for children, as World Vision recognizes that children in poverty do not have equal opportunity to learn. Their website is always open to donate, whether one time, a subscription, or through sponsoring a child. Donations are not used by simply giving to the poor, but rather to help them combat poverty as a whole. In the United States that happens mainly through working with over 2,300 local, non-profit organizations that they partner with to help end poverty in America. (148)

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One in five American children lives in poverty. We focus our work in some of our nation's most distressed and under-served communities, where poverty is high and opportunities are limited. We also respond to disasters that occur right here in the United States.

Hurricane Matthew blasted the U.S. East Coast, leaving more than 40 people dead and thousands of homes flooded and without power. World Vision is responding to the aftermath.

As millions of students head back to school, World Vision and its partners equip thousands of them with the supplies they need to succeed.

As Baton Rouge families continue cleaning up their homes and assessing losses after August's massive flood, local churches and aid groups are filling the gap for many with relief supplies.

1.7 million
children and adults served in the United States through domestic programs
Thanks to the support of World Vision U.S. donors.

175,487
teachers and students benefited from school supplies provided by our Teacher Resource Center, supporting low-income neighborhoods
Thanks to the support of World Vision U.S. donors.

19,387
children and adults assisted with disaster relief and recovery response
Thanks to the support of World Vision U.S. donors.

Our Approach to U.S. Work

How do you make sure you're having the most impact on children and families in need?

We maximize and multiply our impact by working in partnership with over 3,000 local organizations, rather than limiting our services to what we could do alone. These community-based groups make sure that help gets to the children and families who need it most. We strengthen what's already working.

How do you select the communities where you work?

Why do you work through partners?

Every struggling community in America has faith-based and community-based organizations dedicated to improving the lives of children and families. Most of these groups are under-resourced and overworked because the need is so great.

Rather than duplicate their efforts, World Vision comes alongside them to help them be even more effective with the tools and resources we offer as a strong international organization with years of community development experience.

How do you equip local leaders and organizations to help children and families?

Families living in poverty are often forced to choose between buying food, paying rent, or buying new clothes and shoes for their children. We provide new, high-quality donated products to our partners to distribute to these families. This includes clothing, shoes, personal hygiene items, household goods, home repair materials, and school supplies.

We also train organizations that work with high-risk children and youth for more effective mentoring, academic assistance, and youth empowerment. We especially focus on community solutions that engage young people in the transformation of their communities. Training topics include: 40 Developmental Assets for Children and Youth, Effective Academic Mentoring, Child Protection, and Advocacy to Improve Life for Children and Youth.

How do you help U.S. families devastated by disasters?

We provide food, clothing, and cleaning supplies immediately after a disaster through churches, schools, and community organizations near the impacted area. We provide new, high-quality school supplies to help young people reconnect with their education. We also provide building materials for home repair and long-term rebuilding and recovery.

Ways to Give to Poverty in America

Help those in poverty in the USA: $30+

Your monthly gift to help children and families in the U.S. will provide the basics children living in poverty in our country need to thrive - essentials like food, clothing, personal hygiene and school supplies, building supplies, and more.

Monthly giving is the most effective way to help children and families who need it most. Plus, it lowers costs, which means more of your gift helps kids!

Give $250 worth of necessities: $50

Your gift delivers essentials like brand-new clothing, blankets, personal care items - even toys around the USA. And thanks to donations from clothing manufacturers, your gift will be multiplied in impact.

Ways to Give to Poverty in America

Help those in poverty in America: $30+

Your monthly gift to help children and families in the U.S. will provide the basics children living in poverty in our country need to thrive - essentials like food, clothing, personal hygiene and school supplies, building supplies, and more.

Monthly giving is the most effective way to help children and families who need it most. Plus, it lowers costs, which means more of your gift helps kids!

Give $250 worth of necessities: $50

Your gift delivers essentials like brand-new clothing, blankets, personal care items - even toys around the USA. And thanks to donations from clothing manufacturers, your gift will be multiplied in impact.

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One in five American children lives in poverty. We focus our work in some of our nation's most distressed and under-served communities, where poverty is high and opportunities are limited. We also respond to disasters that occur right here in the United States. Hurricane Matthew blasted the U.S.

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What we get wrong about the poverty gap in education. 

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What we get wrong about the poverty gap in education. 

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In this article from The Washington Post, Mical Raz explains how our country and lawmakers are misinterpreting what the true issue with poverty is. Many of the outreach programs in our nation are trying to help low income families, due to the misconception that low-income families do not help their children academically enough. The term 'cultural deprivation' was used, since people assume that poor families will not instill cultural norms, values, and skills that are common in our society, to their children. People aren't focusing on the family's in poverty basic needs like food or healthcare. Programs are instead targeting their perceived issue that these families in poverty need help due to lack of motivation and passion for things like reading. These misinterpretations of the poverty gap are leading families to not get help with what they truly need, but instead what other people assume they need. (147)

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Brenda Molina, 33, of Manassas Park, Va., reads with Emiliano Martinez, 9 months, of Manassas, at the Georgetown South Early Head Start Child Development Center. Molina spends her time teaching infants, the youngest participants in the Head Start program. (Maddie Meyer/The Washington Post)

If you have young children, chances are you've been to a pediatrician's office and have left with a new book in hand. This is often part of a program, recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics, designed to promote literacy by providing families with age-appropriate books.

Although such programs are uncontroversial and popular, the reasoning behind them - a focus on what poor children and families lack - is misguided.

Over the past 60 years, this emphasis has derailed policies meant to advance early-childhood education. Even more important, it has substituted unfounded critiques of parenting for more significant- and difficult - discussions about how to combat poverty and channel meaningful investments in anti-poverty programs and early education.

Since the 1960s, policymakers, educators and researchers have shared a perception that poor families, often from minority backgrounds, were fundamentally different from middle-class families. While rejecting racist theories of biological difference, researchers in the 1960s focused on the home environment of poor families, particularly families of color, to map out what led to their children's academic struggles.

The result was a theory of "cultural deprivation," which holds that poor families lack the norms, values and skills to succeed within mainstream society. Poor families - and in particular, mothers - were viewed as lacking the skills necessary to instill a love of language and learning in their children.

This theory produced a gulf between what poor families needed and what policymakers believed they needed. Although poor families often lacked food, decent jobs, housing and health care, many programs focused on a perceived lack of motivation, work ethic or love of reading. This gap fueled long-standing stereotypes that blamed poor families for their misfortunes.

The result: public policies that perpetuated stereotypes of low-income families and minorities. These policies often led to ineffective programs.

Consider, for example, Head Start, a program started in 1965 to counter the effects of poverty by providing a stimulating educational environment conducive to child development. One psychologist earnestly wrote that in these compensatory preschools, the teachers' role was to do the "kind of things a 'good' mother does" with her infant. Preschool was touted as beneficial to families from inadequate homes, essentially intending to provide the children with an experience similar to that of having a middle-class mother.

But this approach was a double-edged sword. If preschool was useful only as a remedial step for "deprived" children, it was difficult to argue that it was beneficial for children from all backgrounds. This sacrificed an opportunity to build consensus behind the need for universal early-childhood education.

Ultimately, it undermined burgeoning bipartisan support for early-childhood education. In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. He acknowledged the benefits of preschool for poor families, but argued that Project Head Start already met this need. Middle-class families, Nixon argued, did not need such educational interventions, and accordingly could make their own private arrangements for child care as necessary.

By stigmatizing early-childhood education as a solution for perceived deficits of poor families, an important opportunity to provide early education to the nation's children was missed. And since then, scholarship and policy for early education has continued to be hamstrung by focusing on perceived parenting problems, rather than on the real effects of poverty, racism and environmental hazards such as lead.

Consider the idea behind the approach of handing out books. This program touts the concept of a "word gap" between children from low-income and more privileged families. This practice is based on a famous 1995 study that counted words spoken by parents to their children, and contended that by age 4, more advantaged children had heard 30 million more words than their poorer peers. The idea of the "word gap" quickly became a buzzword, serving as the rationale for numerous programs such as Reach Out and Read and certain others within Head Start in an attempt to assist poor families in "closing" this gap.

Yet the word-gap study, as scholars have repeatedly shown, was deeply flawed. It was based on a small, unrepresentative sample. In counting words, it relied on a strict criteria by which to define and measure vocabulary. And a new study has recently found that a "word gap" doesn't actually exist: In fact, in some working-class families, children were exposed to more words than their more advantaged peers.

Like those theories of "deprivation" from the 1970s, this word-gap concept points to deficits in children's home lives as the reason for their scholastic disadvantage, rather than asking how poverty shapes those home lives, as well as children's ability to learn and thrive. The result is a practice - handing out books - that doesn't even attempt to solve the economic struggles poor families face.

In a country where more than 40 percent of children live in low-income families, we should ask how communities are failing struggling families. Providing books to children is likely a valuable intervention, but this should be just a beginning. To tackle poverty and educational issues, programs need to focus on providing access to food, housing, education and health care - all necessary to thrive - and not the potential inadequacies of parents.

Instead, we're moving in the wrong direction. Congress recently struggled to renew the Children's Health Insurance Program, which offers health insurance to low-income families. Throughout the country, policymakers are erecting new barriers to accessing public aid, ostensibly to address deficits in motivation, self-sufficiency and work ethic. From Medicaid work requirements to the House version of the farm bill - which links food-stamp eligibility to employment - this portrayal of poor people as lacking in work ethic and motivation, rather than lacking in food, money and employment opportunities, has pernicious effects.

While handing out books is a good thing - and something that we should continue to do - it's time to stop blaming poor families for their circumstances. Children can't learn without food, adequate shelter, good health and quality schools. By focusing on the perceived inadequacies of their parents, we're failing as a society to attack the far more severe impediments to closing education gaps - in part because it's easier to blame poor people than to have hard conversations about unfairness and inequity in our society.

guidelines or contact the commenting team here.

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Perspective | What we get wrong about the poverty gap in education

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If you have young children, chances are you've been to a pediatrician's office and have left with a new book in hand. This is often part of a program, recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics, designed to promote literacy by providing families with age-appropriate books.

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1. Poverty Is a choice. https://communityactionprovo.org/9-questions-asked-poverty/

2. What percentage of school age (4-18) children come from low income families?

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51% of Students are Eligible for Free/Reduced Lunches

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51% of Students are Eligible for Free/Reduced Lunches

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In this Washington Post article, Lyndsey Layton looks at the poverty rates in public schools across the country. The highest density of students living in poverty are in the southern and western states. About 51% of students, ranging from preschool to 12th grade, qualify for free or reduced lunches, which is a predictor of poverty. Students that come from low income homes are more likely to start behind their peers because they aren't exposed to the same opportunities as higher income families. "They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out," which helps explain why they are more susceptible to be left behind. In order to help these children and families, schools need to be supportive and patient and try to offer as much help as possible. (144)

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For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation's public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

"We've all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it's here sooner rather than later," said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. "A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school."

The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the needy children who arrive at school each day.

"When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe," said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

Romero-Smith, 40, who has been a teacher for 19 years, became a foster mother in November to two girls, sisters who attend her school. They had been homeless, their father living on the streets and their mother in jail, she said. When she brought the girls home, she was shocked by the disarray of their young lives.

"Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food, flushing a toilet and washing hands, it took us a little while," she said. "You spend some time with little ones like this and it's gut wrenching. . . . These kids aren't thinking, 'Am I going to take a test today?' They're thinking, 'Am I going to be okay?' "

The job of teacher has expanded to "counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, attorney," she said.

Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers.

"This is a watershed moment when you look at that map," said Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation, the nation's oldest education philanthropy, referring to a large swath of the country filled with high-poverty schools.

"The fact is, we've had growing inequality in the country for many years," he said. "It didn't happen overnight, but it's steadily been happening. Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we're a country disinclined to invest in our young people."

The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches - ranging from Mississippi, where more than 70 percent of students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one of every two students was low-income.

Carey Wright, Mississippi's state superintendent of education, said quality preschool is the key to helping poor children.

"That's huge," she said. "These children can learn at the highest levels, but you have to provide for them. You can't assume they have books at home, or they visit the library or go on vacations. You have to think about what you're doing across the state and ensuring they're getting what other children get."

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was born in a charity hospital in 1959 to a single mother. Federal programs helped shrink the obstacles he faced, first by providing him with Head Start, the early-childhood education program, and later, Pell grants to help pay tuition at the University of Texas, he said.

The country needs to make that same commitment today to help poor children, he said.

"Even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that America wanted me to succeed," he said. "What we know is that the mobility escalator has simply stopped for some Americans. I was able to ride that mobility escalator in part because there were so many people, and parts of our society, cheering me on."

"We need to fix the escalator," he said. "We fix it by recommitting ourselves to the idea of public education. We have the capacity. The question is, do we have the will?"

The new report raises questions among educators and officials about whether states and the federal government are devoting enough money - and using it effectively - to meet the complex needs of poor children.

The Obama administration wants Congress to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion it spends annually to help states educate poor children. It also wants Congress to fund preschool for those from low-income families. Collectively, the states and the federal government spend about $500 billion annually on primary and secondary schools, about $79 billion of it from Washington.

The amount spent on each student can vary wildly from state to state. States with high student-poverty rates tend to spend less per student: Of the 27 states with the highest percentages of student poverty, all but five spent less than the national average of $10,938 per student.

Republicans in Congress have been wary of new spending programs, arguing that more money is not necessarily the answer and that federal dollars could be more effective if redundant programs were streamlined and more power was given to states.

Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools.

GOP leaders in Congress have rebuffed President Obama's calls to fund preschool for low-income families, although a number of Republican and Democratic governors have initiated state programs in the past several years.

The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country's main federal education law, first passed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" and designed to help states educate poor children. The most recent version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, has emphasized accountability and outcomes, measuring whether schools met benchmarks and sanctioning them when they fell short.

That federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrongheaded, Rebell said.

"We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education," he said. "We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we're serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They're not. They're imperative."

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Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty

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For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

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All around the world many people struggle with feeding their families. A church in my community, Caldwell Methodist Church, in Waterford, WI hosts a food pantry on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of every month. This organization collects and distributes food to hunger-relief charities. Food pantries distribute many millions of pounds of food each year. Food pantries and food banks are similar yet different. Food pantries function as the arms that reach out to that community directly, and a food bank is the warehouse for millions of pounds of food and other products that go out to the community. One thing all food banks have in common with food pantries is that they rely on donors to carry out their day to day operations. (124)

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What is a food bank?

A food bank is a non-profit organization that collects and distributes food to hunger-relief charities. Food banks act as food storage and distribution depots for smaller front line agencies; and usually do not themselves give out food directly to people struggling with hunger.

Food banks in the U.S. are very diverse - from small operations serving people spread out across large rural areas to very large facilities that store and distribute many millions of pounds of food each year, and everything in between. A variety of factors impact how food banks work, from the size of the facility to the number of staff members. But, one thing all food banks have in common is that they rely on donors and volunteers to carry out their day-to-day operations. Watch this video to see how Feeding America works ›

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How Do Food Banks Work? | Feeding America

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A food bank is a non-profit organization that collects and distributes food to hunger-relief charities. Food banks act as food storage and distribution depots for smaller front line agencies; and usually do not themselves give out food directly to people struggling with hunger. Food banks in the U.S.

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1. Poverty means that the income level from employment is so low that the basic human needs cannot be met.

2. Below is a video explaining poverty.