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China raises subsidies for needy students

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BEIJING - China has raised subsidies for students from financially-difficult families to ensure all children of school age study at schools, officials have said.

Officials from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance made the comment in a Q&A interview with Xinhua on Thursday.

Since the education reform and development outline was issued in 2010, the country has improved its system of offering subsidies to students, including preschoolers and high school students, and improving nutrition for rural students during their years of compulsory education, according to the officials.

China has expanded the scale of subsidies, including those to help more poor students in more fields, and standards for offering subsidies have also been raised, they said.

The annual subsidy for each needy pupil is currently 1,000 yuan ($157.5) during compulsory education in rural areas, two times the amount offered in 2009. That for each student pursuing college education has been raised to 3,000 yuan, 1,000 yuan more than in 2009.

The educational fund system has covered many fields, helping poor families solve not only basic learning needs but also living needs when their children are at school.

From 2007 to 2011, subsidies reached 352.62 billion yuan, with 243.17 billion yuan, or 69 percent, coming from government funds, according to the officials.

Moreover, social funds also increased over the four-year period to reach 109.45 billion yuan, or 31 percent of the total funds.

The government has also encouraged colleges to recruit more students from under-developed areas in the country's western regions in order to promote balanced education among different regions.

China currently exempts students in both urban and rural areas from school fees during their years of compulsory education, provides free textbooks for students from needy families and offers subsidies to underprivileged students from rural areas.

The government has also adopted favorable policies to boost the development of pre-school education to ensure needy children, orphans and the disabled enjoy preschool educations.

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China raises subsidies for needy students

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BEIJING - China has raised subsidies for students from financially-difficult families to ensure all children of school age study at schools, officials have said. Officials from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance made the comment in a Q&A interview with Xinhua on Thursday.

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New study finds that 36% of college students don’t have enough to eat.

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New study finds that 36% of college students don’t have enough to eat.

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With the increasing number of poor students on campus, competition for low-wage jobs on campus is also increasing, which makes it more difficult for students to earn their own living

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College students have a lot to worry about. They need to keep their grades up, they need to fill their resumes and they need to get by on razor-thin budgets.

But these some of these stressors may be even more intense than previously understood. According to a survey released this month by researchers at Temple University and the college affordability-focused Wisconsin HOPE Lab, more than a third of students are struggling with basic needs such as food and housing.

Researchers surveyed 43,000 college students at 66 schools and found that 36 percent of students on U.S. college campuses are considered "food insecure," meaning they do not get enough to eat. Similar studies echo these statistics.

Hunger is a particularly prevalent issue on community college campuses. The study found that 42 percent of community college students were food insecure. On private four-year college campuses, just 14 percent of students were considered food insecure.

One of the biggest issues for students is affording healthy food, with 46 percent of community college students and 40 percent of four-year college students reporting an inability to pay for balanced meals.

Housing is also a major challenge for college students. Researchers found that 36 percent of all college students and 46 percent of community college students were considered to be housing insecure. Nine percent of four-year college students and 12 percent of community college students reported experiencing completely homeless in the past year. Among community college students, 22 percent reported being both food and housing insecure.

Unsurprisingly, when students are forced to worry about when their next meal will be or where they will sleep at night, their academic performances suffer. One study from researchers at the University of Florida found that food insecure students were more likely to have GPAs below a B average.

Food and housing insecurity have also been linked to delayed graduation, which can force students to take on even more debt in order to finish their degrees. In some situations, students are forced to drop out of college and must begin repaying loans without the professional benefits of having an advanced degree.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, lead author of the report, tells the Washington Post that the rising costs of college is just one reason that such high proportions of students lack basic necessities.

According to most recent figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the cost of college room and board has increased 50 percent over the past 20 years and costs an average of $9,929 for one school year.

"Prices have gone up over time," says Goldrick-Rab. "But the rising price is just a piece. This is a systemic problem."

Another reason that food and housing insecurity has increased among college students is that more low-income students are attending college in the first place - effectively forcing college campuses to face issues related to poverty potentially for the first time.

As the number of poor students on college campuses increases so does competition for on-campus and low-wage jobs, making it more difficult for students to support themselves.

Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education tells the Washington Post , "There has been an uptick in low-income students on campus, but there hasn't been a corresponding change in university policy to welcome and prepare for these students."

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New study finds that 36% of college students don't have enough to eat

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College students have a lot to worry about. They need to keep their grades up, they need to fill their resumes and they need to get by on razor-thin budgets. But these some of these stressors may be even more intense than previously understood.

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The China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFFPA) has been trying to raise funds through the new Great Wall project, but the funds have not been in place.

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Statistics show that 20 percent of the nation's 16 million college students are from needy families who struggle to pay fees that have been rising since the country launched a reform of its higher education system in the mid 1990s.

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Policy change and research to help China's invisible poor.

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Rural poor students in China face many obstacles. The ultimate goal of REAP is to help students from poor rural households in China overcome these obstacles ...

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Assistance to Help Poor StudentsBeijing Establishes a Foundation for Poor Students to Prevent Corruption.

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Assistance to Help Poor Students -- china.org.cn

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"It may help to prevent the possibility of corruption," Zhang said. But he admitted that such a scheme could bring difficulties when trying to verify the details of student applications because China was such a big country and it would be impossible to visit each the homes of all students applying for assistance.

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In a new book, Linda Tirado elaborates on her viral essay, ‘Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts.’

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In a new book, Linda Tirado elaborates on her viral essay, 'Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts.'

Tirado's book is not a sob story; it's a confrontation with the way poor people are judged day after day-by good liberals and evil Republicans.

Linda Tirado is angry, and she wants to make you angry, too. Even when her voice is calm and clear, lining up cold numbers and hard truths, it's lit up by fury, ignited by the experience of being poor in the richest country in the world. Let me be clear (to use one of Tirado's favorite turns of phrase): This is not a criticism. Given the story she has to tell, of injustice and indignity, it is remarkable that she, and the millions of other Americans living that story, aren't angrier.

The kernel of Tirado's book, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, out October 2, was an essay that she wrote last year on an online forum in response to the question "Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive?" That broad question implied several more specific ones, which haunt all our debates over how the state should support the poor and how far it should dictate how they live in exchange. Why do poor people eat junk food (and feed it to their kids)? Why do they have kids at all? Why do they smoke, drink and take drugs? Why do they drop out of school? Tirado, 32, had fielded versions of these questions many times in her years working minimum-wage jobs after leaving home at 16 and dropping out of college. Her response sought to replace that faceless, misbehaving "they" with an honest and forthright "I." It explained, from the inside, all the problems that spiral from a simple lack of money: How minimum wage means no benefits means long hours means endless commuting means bad food means no sleep means sickness means self-medication. All of which means no time to plan ahead, save money, move forward. Which means having kids anyway, because there'll never be a better time. (Tirado and her husband, a former Marine, have two young daughters.)

Tirado's essay, "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts" went viral with a speed that knocked her sideways. It was reprinted by The Nation, Forbes and The Huffington Post and attracted thousands of messages of support, mixed up with vitriolic efforts to debunk the story and discredit its author. In her book, Tirado describes how a car accident and the subsequent impossible cost of dental care left her with a mouthful of damaged and decayed teeth. After her story went viral and online doubters questioned the truth of her story, she decided to go "full fuck-you gutter punk" and display them in a video for the Internet to see. The book similarly confronts readers with the ugly and painful reality of poverty and challenges us not to look away.

Although the story Tirado tells is based on her life, she avoids telling it in a linear way, tied to a specific period and place. It's not clear in what order the dead-end jobs line up or whether a sleazy boss in one chapter is the same one she walks out on later. Sometimes she's in Utah, sometimes Ohio, sometimes California, and now Washington, D.C.; sometimes she's single, sometimes not. Tracking her story through these vivid but scattered fragments makes it hard to get a handle on Tirado as a whole person, whose singular experiences and voice make her such a riveting narrator. But these details, she implies, don't matter-there's nowhere in the country where $7.25 an hour allows you to have a life, rather than just about live, and all these service and retail jobs are basically interchangeable. A chronological structure makes it too easy for a reader to intervene and judge-that's where you went wrong, or there-and miss the story's larger point, that "poverty is a potential outcome for all of us."

This is scary to admit. In a country with vast resources but a social safety net that's been shredded to ribbons, "the layer between lower-middle class and poor is horrifyingly porous from above," Tirado writes. "A lot of us live in that spongy divide." Our finely tuned class distinctions are a way of trying to order that "spongy divide" and predict who will fall-not us! Tirado's distinctions, on the other hand, are rooted in experience: "Poverty is when a quarter is a fucking miracle. Poor is when a dollar is a miracle. Broke is when five bucks is a miracle." Working class, you have a place to live; middle class, that place is secure, even "nice," and you can buy furniture and toys; and "rich is anything above that." This is not about the 99% and the 1%, terms Tirado doesn't use. When she addresses "rich people," she means the people who can afford to buy this book and have the leisure to read it-not Koch-level plutocrats. People whose lives are relatively stable, who might have a decent credit score, health insurance, a bank account, retirement savings, the basic requirements of civic life that we have redefined as luxuries for the luckiest.

This important redefining of "rich" means that when Tirado addresses a final chapter to "Rich People," the reader has to line up with the straw men: right-wing hypocrites who think the poor are lazy, or smug urbanites who believe that a lack of organic kale equals child abuse. I'm not a rich person, you want to protest-I don't think it's superior to get drunk on claret in a restaurant rather than on moonshine at the side of the road. But Tirado keeps tapping your knee and she'll find a place that makes you jerk, where you find yourself thinking, I wouldn't do that. You should make a different choice. Her refusal to flatter the reader gives the book its urgency and its force. It's not a sob story (though it could make you weep with frustration); it's a confrontation with the way that poor people are seen and judged day after day-by good liberals as well as evil Republicans, by the 99% as well as the 0.01%.

Tirado's stories, her calculations, and her statistics are not new. When you reach a chapter called "You Can't Pay a Doctor in Chickens Anymore," you take a deep breath, because you know what's coming. It's still shocking, though, that an expectant first-time mother on Medicaid can't find a clinic to give her care and has to rely on books, friends and Google until she shows up at the ER to give birth. Dental care, mental health care, vision care, preventative care-it all costs money, and its lack is written on the bodies of the poor. We might imagine that people who clean toilets or fry fast food are exhausted and demoralized; we might not appreciate that they probably have to ask their boss for permission to pee, since American workers aren't guaranteed bathroom breaks. We might not always register that the service worker speaking in perky inanities is reading from a script and can be fired if she misses a word. We might not do the math to calculate that the earnings from a 40-hour-a-week job on minimum wage, after half go to housing, equal $7,540. Per year. Even a more generous calculation-10 bucks an hour, one-third on rent-gives you 10 unallocated dollars a day, so "the world is your oyster." In case the tone's too subtle here, Tirado clarifies: "The math doesn't fucking work."

Tirado is no martyr, and she doesn't romanticize poverty, although she does suggest that the poor tend to be rather "a bit more generous" than the rich, likely for the simple reason that "we understand what it might be like to have to beg." She makes the passionate case that parenting while poor isn't a crime, and that kids need a lot less than we might think-a crooked rainbow painted on her children's bedroom wall is, for a decent while, "a pretty fucking cool rainbow" and not a marker of deprivation. An awareness of class status, of having and having not, is something children learn, and too often, something that their parents teach. It doesn't matter if kids wear hand-me-downs. It does matter that they're loved, and that it's not assumed that their parents are less loving because they're poor. But even if Tirado's kids grow up smart and healthy, the world they're inheriting is in no way an equal one, and they'll have to fight harder for every opportunity than the children of the rich. We should all be a lot angrier about that.

Joanna Scutts is a freelance writer based in Queens, NY, and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the New Yorker Online, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal and several other publications. You can follow her on Twitter @JC_Scuttsr.

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In a new book, Linda Tirado elaborates on her viral essay, 'Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts.' Tirado's book is not a sob story; it's a confrontation with the way poor people are judged day after day-by good liberals and evil Republicans. Linda Tirado is angry, and she wants to make you angry, too.

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He once wrote: Research on Poor Students and Educational Assistance

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杨昌江 杨昌江人物履历 杨昌江任免信息

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杨昌江（中国石化集团公司党群工作部主任）_百度百科

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杨昌江，男，在职研究生学历，工商管理硕士学位，1984年9月加入中国共产党，1977年8月参加工作。现任任中国石化集团公司党群工作部(党组办公室)主任，直属党委副书记、工会工作委员会副主任、青年工作委员会副主任。...

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How Homeless College Students Get by at California's Humboldt State | NowThis

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How Homeless College Students Get by at California's Humboldt State | NowThis

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For a shocking number of students, the college experience means living in your car to avoid massive debt. These two students showed us how they get by while homeless and in college.

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How Homeless College Students Get by at California's Humboldt State | NowThis

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Life In Poverty by Sunway College Students

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Life In Poverty by Sunway College Students

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This is a documentary of giving a glimpse of what life is like in poverty.

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Life In Poverty by Sunway College Students

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Why poor students drop out even when financial aid covers the cost

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Why poor students drop out even when financial aid covers the cost

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Difficulties for poor students to graduate.

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Why poor students drop out even when financial aid covers the cost

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China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) (Chinese: 中国扶贫基金会) is a nongovernmental charitable organization based in Beijing, registered at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, PRC, in 1989 and professionally supervised by the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development.

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china foundation for poverty alleviation

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China Foundation For Poverty Alleviation

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China Foundation For Poverty Alleviation

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Hidaya Foundation provides partial or full assistance to poor students from primary school to university levels, who are not in a position to continue their education because of financial hardships.

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Hidaya is currently supporting over 5,000 students under the Support Poor Students project!

Hidaya Foundation provides partial or full assistance to poor students from primary school to university levels, who are not in a position to continue their education because of financial hardships. Areas of assistance include: admission fees, text books, tuition fees, exam fees, hostel fees, uniforms, backpacks, school supplies, stationery items, as well as a stipend which may range from per month depending on local conditions and economic status of each student's family. Please donate for these efforts, your donations will go a long way to build a bright future for the next generations in poor countries.

Sign up for Automatic Monthly Donation towards this project.

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Support Poor Students - Hidaya Foundation

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Hidaya is currently supporting over 5,000 students under the Support Poor Students project! Hidaya Foundation provides partial or full assistance to poor students from primary school to university levels, who are not in a position to continue their education because of financial hardships.

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Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story

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Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story

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Poor Student Films

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Film BShanghai Jiaotong University

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Hand in Hand International is a member of the Hand in Hand Network, a global group of NGOs that has worked in 14 countries and counting. Our goal is to eradicate poverty in the communities where we work.

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Hand in Hand International | Fight Poverty With Jobs

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Fight Poverty With Jobs | Hand in Hand International

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Hand in Hand fights poverty with jobs. Our network works in 12 countries; we nurture the creation of more than 1,000 jobs a day, seven days a week.

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About how chronic poverty affects the brain as well as how it hurts children, families, andcommunities.

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by Eric Jensen

In Chapter 1, we were introduced to history teacher Chris Hawkins. The family Mr. Hawkins grew up in was far from poor: his father was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, and his mother was a store manager. He had no clue what growing up in poverty was like, and he was shocked to learn about what typically goes on (and doesn't go on) in the homes of his kids. He has learned that there's far more behind the apathetic or aggressive behaviors, commonly attributed to a lack of politeness or dismissed as "lower-class" issues, than he had assumed. What he's learned about his students has depressed and discouraged him. The mantra that gets him through the year is the thought that retirement is only six years away.

The Risk Factors of Poverty

There is no shortage of theories explaining behavior differences among children. The prevailing theory among psychologists and child development specialists is that behavior stems from a combination of genes and environment. Genes begin the process: behavioral geneticists commonly claim that DNA accounts for 30-50 percent of our behaviors (Saudino, 2005), an estimate that leaves 50-70 percent explained by environment.

This tidy division of influencing factors may be somewhat misleading, however. First, the effects of the nine months a child spends in utero are far from negligible, especially on IQ (Devlin, Daniels, & Roeder, 1997). Factors such as quality of prenatal care, exposure to toxins, and stress have a strong influence on the developing child. In addition, the relatively new field of epigenetics -the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in primary DNA sequence-blurs the line between nature and nurture. Environment affects the receptors on our cells, which send messages to genes, which turn various functional switches on or off. It's like this: like light switches, genes can be turned on or off. When they're switched on, they send signals that can affect the processes or structures in individual cells. For example, lifting weights tells the genes to "turn on" the signal to build muscle tissue. Genes can be either activated or shut off by a host of other environmental factors, such as stress and nutrition. These switches can either strengthen or impair aggression, immune function, learning, and memory (Rutter, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2006).

Recent evidence (Harris, 2006) suggests that the complex web of social relationships students experience-with peers, adults in the school, and family members-exerts a much greater influence on their behavior than researchers had previously assumed. This process starts with students' core relationships with parents or primary caregivers in their lives, which form a personality that is either secure and attached or insecure and unattached. Securely attached children typically behave better in school (Blair et al., 2008). Once students are in school, the dual factors of socialization and social status contribute significantly to behavior. The school socialization process typically pressures students to be like their peers or risk social rejection, whereas the quest for high social status drives students to attempt to differentiate themselves in some areas-sports, personal style, sense of humor, or street skills, for example.

Socioeconomic status forms a huge part of this equation. Children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront, and their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that undermine good school performance. Let's revisit the most significant risk factors affecting children raised in poverty, which I discussed in Chapter 1 (the word EACH is a handy mnemonic):

Combined, these factors present an extraordinary challenge to academic and social success. This reality does not mean that success in school or life is impossible. On the contrary, a better understanding of these challenges points to actions educators can take to help their less-advantaged students succeed.

Emotional and Social Challenges

Many low-SES children face emotional and social instability. Typically, the weak or anxious attachments formed by infants in poverty become the basis for full-blown insecurity during the early childhood years. Very young children require healthy learning and exploration for optimal brain development. Unfortunately, in impoverished families there tends to be a higher prevalence of such adverse factors as teen motherhood, depression, and inadequate health care, all of which lead to decreased sensitivity toward the infant (van Ijzendoorn et al., 2004) and, later, poor school performance and behavior on the child's part.

Theory and Research

Beginning at birth, the attachment formed between parent and child predicts the quality of future relationships with teachers and peers (Szewczyk-Sokolowski, Bost, & Wainwright, 2005) and plays a leading role in the development of such social functions as curiosity, arousal, emotional regulation, independence, and social competence (Sroufe, 2005). The brains of infants are hardwired for only six emotions: joy, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, and fear (Ekman, 2003). To grow up emotionally healthy, children under 3 need

A strong, reliable primary caregiver who provides consistent and unconditional love, guidance, and support.

Safe, predictable, stable environments.

Ten to 20 hours each week of harmonious, reciprocal interactions. This process, known as attunement, is most crucial during the first 6-24 months of infants' lives and helps them develop a wider range of healthy emotions, including gratitude, forgiveness, and empathy.

Enrichment through personalized, increasingly complex activities.

Children raised in poverty are much less likely to have these crucial needs met than their more affluent peers are and, as a result, are subject to some grave consequences. Deficits in these areas inhibit the production of new brain cells, alter the path of maturation, and rework the healthy neural circuitry in children's brains, thereby undermining emotional and social development and predisposing them to emotional dysfunction (Gunnar, Frenn, Wewerka, & Van Ryzin, 2009; Miller, Seifer, Stroud, Sheinkopf, & Dickstein, 2006).

The need for human contact and warmth is well established. A study of infants in Irish foundling homes in the early 1900s found that of the 10,272 infants admitted to homes with minimal or absent maternal nurturing over a 25-year period, only 45 survived. Most of the survivors grew into pathologically unstable and socially problem-ridden adults (Joseph, 1999).

In many poor households, parental education is substandard, time is short, and warm emotions are at a premium-all factors that put the attunement process at risk (Feldman & Eidelman, 2009; Kearney, 1997; Segawa, 2008). Caregivers tend to be overworked, overstressed, and authoritarian with children, using the same harsh disciplinary strategies used by their own parents. They often lack warmth and sensitivity (Evans, 2004) and fail to form solid, healthy relationships with their children (Ahnert, Pinquart, & Lamb, 2006).

In addition, low-income caregivers are typically half as likely as higher-income parents are to be able to track down where their children are in the neighborhood (Evans, 2004), and frequently they do not know the names of their children's teachers or friends. One study found that only 36 percent of low-income parents were involved in three or more school activities on a regular basis, compared with 59 percent of parents above the poverty line (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000).

Low-SES children are often left home to fend for themselves and their younger siblings while their caregivers work long hours; compared with their well-off peers, they spend less time playing outdoors and more time watching television and are less likely to participate in after-school activities (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Unfortunately, children won't get the model for how to develop proper emotions or respond appropriately to others from watching cartoons; they need warm, person-to-person interactions. The failure to form positive relationships with peers inflicts long-term socioemotional consequences (Szewczyk-Sokolowski et al., 2005).

The human brain "downloads" the environment indiscriminately in an attempt to understand and absorb the surrounding world, whether that world is positive or negative. When children gain a sense of mastery of their environments, they are more likely to develop feelings of self-worth, confidence, and independence, which play heavily into the formation of children's personalities (Sroufe, 2005) and ultimately predict their success and happiness in relationships and in life in general. Economic hardship makes it more difficult for caregivers to create the trusting environments that build children's secure attachments. Behavior research shows that children from impoverished homes develop psychiatric disturbances and maladaptive social functioning at a greater rate than their affluent counterparts do (McCoy, Firck, Loney, & Ellis, 1999). In addition, low-SES children are more likely to have social conduct problems, as rated by both teachers and peers over a period of four years (Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994). Unfortunately, a study of negative emotionality and maternal support found that low-income parents were less able than were well-off parents to adjust their parenting to the demands of higher-needs children (Paulussen-Hoogeboom, Stams, Hermanns, & Peetsma, 2007).

Low-income parents are often overwhelmed by diminished self-esteem, depression, and a sense of powerlessness and inability to cope-feelings that may get passed along to their children in the form of insufficient nurturing, negativity, and a general failure to focus on children's needs. In a study of emotional problems of children of single mothers, Keegan-Eamon and Zuehl (2001) found that the stress of poverty increases depression rates among mothers, which results in an increased use of physical punishment. Children themselves are also susceptible to depression: research shows that poverty is a major predictor of teenage depression (Denny, Clark, Fleming, & Wall, 2004).

Effects on School Behavior and Performance

Strong, secure relationships help stabilize children's behavior and provide the core guidance needed to build lifelong social skills. Children who grow up with such relationships learn healthy, appropriate emotional responses to everyday situations. But children raised in poor households often fail to learn these responses, to the detriment of their school performance. For example, students with emotional dysregulation may get so easily frustrated that they give up on a task when success was just moments away. And social dysfunction may inhibit students' ability to work well in cooperative groups, quite possibly leading to their exclusion by group members who believe they aren't "doing their part" or "pulling their share of the load." This exclusion and the accompanying decrease in collaboration and exchange of information exacerbate at-risk students' already shaky academic performance and behavior.

Some teachers may interpret students' emotional and social deficits as a lack of respect or manners, but it is more accurate and helpful to understand that the students come to school with a narrower range of appropriate emotional responses than we expect. The truth is that many children simply don't have the repertoire of necessary responses. It is as though their brains' "emotional keyboards" play only a few notes (see Figure 2.1).

The proper way to deal with such a deficit is first to understand students' behavior and then to lay out clear behavioral expectations without sarcasm or resentment. Understand that children raised in poverty are more likely to display

These behaviors will likely puzzle, frustrate, or irritate teachers who have less experience teaching students raised in poverty, but it's important to avoid labeling, demeaning, or blaming students. It is much easier to condemn a student's behavior and demand that he or she change it than it is to help the student change it. Every proper response that you don't see at your school is one that you need to be teaching. Rather than telling kids to "be respectful," demonstrate appropriate emotional responses and the circumstances in which to use them, and allow students to practice applying them. To shift your own responses to inappropriate behavior, reframe your thinking: expect students to be impulsive, to blurt inappropriate language, and to act "disrespectful" until you teach them stronger social and emotional skills and until the social conditions at your school make it attractive not to do those things.

It's impossible to overemphasize this: every emotional response other than the six hardwired emotions of joy, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, and fear must be taught. Cooperation, patience, embarrassment, empathy, gratitude, and forgiveness are crucial to a smoothly running complex social environment (like a classroom). When students lack these learned responses, teachers who expect humility or penitence may get a smirk instead, a response that may lead teachers to believe the student has an "attitude." It's the primary caregiver's job to teach the child when and how to display these emotional responses, but when students do not bring these necessary behaviors to school, the school must teach them.

What all students do bring to school are three strong "relational" forces that drive their school behaviors (Harris, 2006):

1. The drive for reliable relationships. Students want the safety of a primary safe and reliable relationship. Students would prefer parents, positive friends, and teachers, but they'd take an "iffy" friend if no one else were available. The relationships that teachers build with students form the single strongest access to student goals, socialization, motivation, and academic performance. For your school to foster high achievement, every student will need a reliable partner or mentor.

2. The strengthening of peer socialization. Socialization is the drive for acceptance that encourages students to imitate their peers and join groups, from clubs to cliques to gangs. Students want to belong somewhere. Evidence suggests that it is peers, not parents, who have the greatest influence on school-age students (Harris, 1998). If your school aims to improve student achievement, academic success must be culturally acceptable among your students.

3. The quest for importance and social status. This is the quest to feel special. Students compete for attention and social elevation by choosing roles that will distinguish them (e.g., athlete, comedian, storyteller, gang leader, scholar, or style maverick). Kids are very interested in what other kids do, whether others like them, and how they rate on the social scale (Harris, 2006). Every student will need to feel like the "status hunt" can just as well lead to better grades as better behaviors.

Each of these forces shapes behaviors in significant ways. Schools that succeed use a combination of formal and informal strategies to influence these three domains. Informally, teachers can incorporate classroom strategies that build relationships and strengthen peer acceptance and social skills in class. This is a fair warning to all administrators: do not dismiss the so-called "soft side" of students' lives, the social side. It runs their brains, their feelings, and their behaviors-and those three run cognition! There is a complex interplay between cognition and emotions. When students feel socialized and accepted, they perform better academically. However, pushing students harder and harder into performing well academically may conflict with social/relational success. You will hit a test score ceiling until you include students' emotional and social lives in your school "makeover." Accordingly, throughout the remainder of this book, I offer specific strategies that address all three of the relational forces.

Action Steps

Embody respect. You can't change what's in your students' bank account, but you can change what's in their emotional account. It may require a considerable shift in your thinking. It is fruitless simply to demand respect from students; many just don't have the context, background, or skills to show it. Instead,

Embed social skills. At every grade level, use a variety of classroom strategies that strengthen social and emotional skills. For example,

Teach basic but crucial meet-and-greet skills. Early in the year, when students introduce themselves to other classmates, teach students to face one another, make eye contact, smile, and shake hands.

Embed turn-taking skills in class, even at the secondary level. You can introduce and embed these skills using such strategies as learning stations, partner work, and cooperative learning.

Remind students to thank their classmates after completing collaborative activities.

Implement social-emotional skill-building programs in the early years. Programs like the PATHS program, Conscious Discipline, and Love and Logic embed social skills into a classroom management framework.

Be inclusive. Create a familial atmosphere by using inclusive and affiliative language. For example,

Always refer to the school as "our school" and the class as "our class"; avoid using a me-and-you model that reinforces power structures.

Acknowledge students who make it to class, and thank them for small things.

Celebrate effort as well as achievement; praise students for reaching milestones as well as for fulfilling end goals. Pack acknowledgments and celebrations into every single class.

Acute and Chronic Stressors

Stress can be defined as the physiological response to the perception of loss of control resulting from an adverse situation or person. Occasional or "roller-coaster" stress is healthy for all of us; it supports our immune function and helps develop resiliency. However, the acute and chronic stress that children raised in poverty experience leaves a devastating imprint on their lives. Acute stress refers to severe stress resulting from exposure to such trauma as abuse or violence, whereas chronic stress refers to high stress sustained over time. Low-SES children are more subject to both of these types of stress than are their more affluent peers, but chronic stress is more common and exerts a more relentless influence on children's day-today lives. Children living in poverty experience significantly greater chronic stress than do their more affluent counterparts (Almeida, Neupert, Banks, & Serido, 2005) (see Figure 2.2). This kind of stress exerts a devastating, insidious influence on children's physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive functioning-areas that affect brain development, academic success, and social competence. Students subjected to such stress may lack crucial coping skills and experience significant behavioral and academic problems in school.

Theory and Research

The biology of stress is simple in some ways and complex in others. On a basic level, every one of the 30-50 trillion cells in your body is experiencing either healthy or unhealthy growth. Cells cannot grow and deteriorate at the same time. Ideally, the body is in homeostatic balance: a state in which the vital measures of human function-heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, and so on-are in their optimal ranges. A stressor is anything that threatens to disrupt homeostasis-for example, criticism, neglect, social exclusion, lack of enrichment, malnutrition, drug use, exposure to toxins, abuse, or trauma. When cells aren't growing, they're in a "hunker down" mode that conserves resources for a threatened future. When billions or trillions of cells are under siege in this manner, you get problems.

Although the body is well adapted to deal with short-term threats to homeostasis, chronic or acute stressors challenge the body differently. Among low-income families, stressors may include living in overcrowded, substandard housing or unsafe neighborhoods; enduring community or domestic violence, separation or divorce, or the loss of family members; and experiencing financial strain, forced mobility, or material deprivation (Evans & English, 2002). The frequency and intensity of both stressful life events and daily hassles are greater among low-SES children (Attar, Guerra, & Tolan, 1994). For example, in any given year, more than half of all poor children deal with evictions, utility disconnections, overcrowding, or lack of a stove or refrigerator, compared with only 13 percent of well-off children (Lichter, 1997). In addition, such factors as lack of proper supervision, physical neglect or abuse, inadequate day care and schools, difficulties in forming healthy friendships, and vulnerability to depression combine to exert inordinate and debilitating stress upon the developing child.

More often than not, low-income parents are overstressed in trying to meet the daily needs of their families. The resulting depression and negativity often lead to insufficient nurturing, disengaged parenting, and a difficulty in focusing on the needs of children. Compared with middle-income children, low-SES children are exposed to higher levels of familial violence, disruption, and separation (Emery & Laumann-Billings, 1998). Lower levels of parental education and occupation also correlate with greater incidence of neighborhood crimes (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). And compared with their well-off peers, 2- to 4-year-olds from low-income families interact with aggressive peers 40 percent more often in their neighborhoods and 25 percent more often in child care settings (Sinclair, Pettit, Harrist, Dodge, & Bates, 1994).

Abuse is a major stressor to children raised in poverty. Numerous studies (Gershoff, 2002; Slack, Holl, McDaniel, Yoo, & Bolger, 2004) document that caregivers' disciplinary strategies grow harsher as income decreases. Lower-income parents are, on average, more authoritarian with their children, tending to issue harsh demands and inflict physical punishment such as spanking (Bradley, Corwyn, Burchinal, McAdoo, & Coll, 2001; Bradley, Corwyn, McAdoo, & Coll, 2001). One study found that blue-collar parents were twice as likely to use physical punishment with their 7-year-olds as white-collar parents were (Evans, 2004). Hussey, Chang, and Kotch (2006) found that poor children were 1.52 times more likely to report physical neglect and 1.83 times more likely to report sexual abuse than were well-off children. Abuse occurs with much higher frequency when the parents use alcohol or drugs, experience an array of stressful life events (Emery & Laumann-Billings, 1998), or live in decrepit, crime-ridden neighborhoods with limited social support networks (Jack & Jordan, 1999).

The cost of these constant stressors is hard to quantify. Exposure to chronic or acute stress is hardwired into children's developing brains, creating a devastating, cumulative effect (Coplan et al., 1996). Compared with a healthy neuron, a stressed neuron generates a weaker signal, handles less blood flow, processes less oxygen, and extends fewer connective branches to nearby cells. The prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, crucial for learning, cognition, and working memory, are the areas of the brain most affected by cortisol, the so-called "stress hormone." Experiments have demonstrated that exposure to chronic or acute stress actually shrinks neurons in the brain's frontal lobes-an area that includes the prefrontal cortex and is responsible for such functions as making judgments, planning, and regulating impulsivity (Cook & Wellman, 2004)-and can modify and impair the hippocampus in ways that reduce learning capacity (Vythilingam et al., 2002).

Unpredictable stressors severely impair the brain's capacity to learn and remember (Yang et al., 2003). Child abuse, for example, is highly disruptive to such developmental processes as the formation of healthy attachments, emotional regulation, and temperament formation, and leads to a wide array of social-emotional and psychological disturbances in adulthood (Emery & Laumann-Billings, 1998). Neurobiological studies have shown considerable alterations in the brain development of neglected or abused children. The production of "fight-or-flight" stress hormones in these children atrophies the areas that control emotional regulation, empathy, social functioning, and other skills imperative to healthy emotional development (Joseph, 1999).

Chronic stress not only diminishes the complexity of neurons in the frontal lobe and the hippocampus but also increases the complexity of neurons in the amygdala, the brain's emotion center (Conrad, 2006). This increased complexity may make the stressed brain's neurons far more sensitive to memory modulation than neurons in nonstressed brains. In chronically stressed kids, the combined effects on the hippocampus and the amygdala may be precisely what facilitates emotional memory (the aspect of memory that encompasses highly salient memories of events such as divorce, abuse, trauma, death, or abandonment) and reduces declarative memory (the aspect of memory that stores standard knowledge and learning).

Chronic, unmediated stress often results in a condition known as an allostatic load. Allostatic load is "carryover" stress. Instead of returning to a healthy baseline of homeostasis, the growing brain adapts to negative life experiences so that it becomes either hyper-responsive or hypo-responsive. Szanton, Gill, and Allen (2005) found higher rates of chronic stress and allostatic load among low-income populations than among high-income populations.

Effects on School Behavior and Performance

Kids coming to your school don't wear signs that say "Caution! Chronic Stressors Live Here." But stress has an insidious effect on learning and behavior, and you should recognize the symptoms in the classroom. Chronic stress

Is linked to over 50 percent of all absences (Johnston-Brooks, Lewis, Evans, & Whalen, 1998).

Impairs attention and concentration (Erickson, Drevets, & Schulkin, 2003).

Reduces cognition, creativity, and memory (Lupien, King, Meaney, & McEwen, 2001).

Diminishes social skills and social judgment (Wommack & Delville, 2004).

Reduces motivation, determination, and effort (Johnson, 1981).

Increases the likelihood of depression (Hammack, Robinson, Crawford, & Li, 2004).

Reduces neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells) (De Bellis et al., 2001).

A child who comes from a stressful home environment tends to channel that stress into disruptive behavior at school and be less able to develop a healthy social and academic life (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). Impulsivity, for example, is a common disruptive classroom behavior among low-SES students. But it's actually an exaggerated response to stress that serves as a survival mechanism: in conditions of poverty, those most likely to survive are those who have an exaggerated stress response. Each risk factor in a student's life increases impulsivity and diminishes his or her capacity to defer gratification (see Figure 2.3) (Evans, 2003).

Students raised in poverty are especially subject to stressors that undermine school behavior and performance. For example, girls exposed to abuse tend to experience mood swings in school, while boys experience impairments in curiosity, learning, and memory (Zuena et al., 2008). And the stress resulting from transience-frequent short-distance, poverty-related moves (Schafft, 2006)-also impairs students' ability to succeed in school and engage in positive social interactions. Whereas middle-class families usually move for social or economic improvement, the moves of low-income households are typically not voluntary. In addition to increasing children's uncertainty about the future, these moves compound their stress load by disrupting their social interactions both within the community and in academic environments (Schafft, 2006).

Students who have to worry over safety concerns also tend to underperform academically (Pratt, Tallis, & Eysenck, 1997). Exposure to community violence-an unsafe home neighborhood or a dangerous path to school- contributes to lower academic performance (Schwartz & Gorman, 2003). In addition, stress resulting from bullying and school violence impairs test scores, diminishes attention spans, and increases absenteeism and tardiness (Hoffman, 1996). It is discouraging, but many high school students either stay home or skip classes due to fear of violence.

Socioeconomic status correlates positively with good parenting, which, research has found, improves academic achievement (DeGarmo, Forgatch, & Martinez, 1999). Unfortunately, the converse is also true: the chronic stress of poverty impairs parenting skills, and disengaged or negative parenting in turn impairs children's school performance. Parents who are struggling just to stay afloat tend to work extra hours, odd shifts, or multiple jobs and are less able to provide attention and affection and to devote their time, energy, and resources to their children. These deficits have been associated with higher levels of externalizing behaviors and poor academic performance on children's part (Hsuch & Yoshikawa, 2007).

Fishbein and colleagues (2006) found that adolescence, a period accompanied by dramatic brain changes, is a particularly vulnerable time for children to be exposed to chronic stress. They found that risky decision making (such as alcohol or drug use) and poor social competency correlated with adolescents' previous exposure to highly stressful life events.

In addition, stress adversely affects cognition. One randomized, doubleblind, placebo-controlled study tested the effects of oral doses of cortisol (the stress chemical) on subjects (Newcomer et al., 1999). Cortisol treatment at the higher dose produced reversible decreases in verbal declarative memory in otherwise healthy individuals (Newcomer et al., 1999).

Exposure to chronic or acute stress is debilitating. The most common adaptive behaviors include increased anxiety (as manifested in generalized anxiety disorders or posttraumatic stress disorder) and an increased sense of detachment and helplessness. Students from low-income families who experience disruptive or traumatic events or who lack a measure of connectedness-to family, to the community, or to a religious affiliation-demonstrate increased hopelessness over time (Bolland, Lian, & Formichella, 2005). Nearly half (47 percent) of low-SES African American adolescents reported clinically significant levels of depressive symptoms (Hammack et al., 2004). Low-SES students are more likely to give up or become passive and uninterested in school (Johnson, 1981). This giving-up process is known as learned helplessness. It's not genetic; it's an adaptive response to life conditions. And sadly, it frequently takes hold as early as 1st grade. Many kids with learned helplessness become fatalistic about their lives and are more likely to drop out of school or become pregnant while in their teens.

It is well documented that the effect of stressors is cumulative (Astone, Misra, & Lynch, 2007; Evans, 2004; Evans & English, 2002; Evans, Kim, Ting, Tesher, & Shannis, 2007; Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, & Bound, 2006; Lucey, 2007). Children who have had greater exposure to abuse, neglect, danger, loss, or other poverty-related experiences are more reactive to stressors. Each stressor builds on and exacerbates other stressors and slowly changes the student. It is the cumulative effect of all the stressors that often makes life miserable for poor students.

When researchers provided classes in appropriate coping skills and stress-relieving techniques, subjects demonstrated a decrease in hostility (Wadsworth, Raviv, Compas, & Connor-Smith, 2005) or depressive symptoms (Peden, Rayens, Hall, & Grant, 2005). Unfortunately, these interventions, along with stress-relieving recreational activities, are largely unavailable to those living in poverty. For example, neighborhood parks and recreational facilities tend to be scarcer, in hazardous areas, or in disrepair (Evans, 2004). Poor children are half as likely as well-off children are to be taken to museums, theaters, or the library, and they are less likely to go on vacations or on other fun or culturally enriching outings (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002).

Action Steps

Recognize the signs. Behavior that comes off as apathetic or rude may actually indicate feelings of hopelessness or despair. It is crucial for teachers to recognize the signs of chronic stress in students. Students who are at risk for a stress-related disorder tend to

Believe that they have minimal control over stressors.

Have no idea how long the stressors will last, or how intense they will remain.

Have few outlets through which they can release the frustration caused by the stressors.

Interpret stressors as evidence of circumstances worsening or becoming more hopeless.

Lack social support for the duress caused by the stressors.

Share with other staff members why it's so important to avoid criticizing student impulsivity and "me first" behaviors. Whenever you and your colleagues witness a behavior you consider inappropriate, ask yourselves whether the discipline process is positive and therefore increases the chances for better future behavior, or whether it's punitive and therefore reduces the chances for better future behavior.

Alter the environment. Change the school environment to mitigate stress and resolve potential compliance issues with students who do not want to change:

Reduce the parallels with prison. For example, consider eliminating bells and instead playing songs for class transitions.

Reduce homework stress by incorporating time for homework in class or right after class.

Use cooperative structures; avoid a top-down authoritarian approach.

Help students blow off steam by incorporating celebrations, role-plays, and physical activities (e.g., walks, relays, or games) into your classes.

Incorporate kinesthetic arts (e.g., drama or charades), creative projects (e.g., drawing or playing instruments), and hands-on activities (e.g., building or fixing) into your classes.

Empower students. Help students increase their perception of control over their environment by showing them how to better manage their own stress levels. Instead of telling students to act differently, take the time to teach them how to act differently by

Introducing conflict resolution skills. For example, teach students a multistep process for handling upsets, starting with step 1: "Take a deep breath and count to five."

Teaching students how to deal with anger and frustration (e.g., counting to 10 and taking slow, deep breaths).

Introducing responsibilities and the value of giving restitution. In schools that embrace restitution, students understand that if they disrupt class, they need to "make it right" by doing something positive for the class. For example, a student who throws objects in the classroom may be assigned a cleaning or beautification project for the room.

Teaching students to set goals to focus on what they want.

Role-modeling how to solve real-world problems. Share an actual or hypothetical situation, such as your car running out of gas. You could explain that you tried to stretch the tank of gas too far and reveal how you dealt with the problem (e.g., calling a friend to bring some gas). Such examples show students how to take responsibility for and resolve the challenges they face in life.

Giving students a weekly life problem to solve collectively.

Teaching social skills. For example, before each social interaction (e.g., pair-share or buddy teaching), ask students to make eye contact, shake hands, and give a greeting. At the end of each interaction, have students thank their partners.

Introducing stress reduction techniques, both physical (e.g., dance or yoga) and mental (e.g., guided periods of relaxation or meditation).

Cognitive Lags

Cognitive ability is highly complex. It can be measured in many different ways and is affected by numerous factors, not least of which is socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is strongly associated with a number of indices of children's cognitive ability, including IQ, achievement tests, grade retention rates, and literacy (Baydar, Brooks-Gunn, & Furstenberg, 1993; Brooks-Gunn, Guo, & Furstenberg, 1993; Liaw & Brooks-Gunn, 1994; Smith, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997). There is a gulf between poor and well-off children's performance on just about every measure of cognitive development, from the Bayley Infant Behavior Scales to standardized achievement tests. The correlations between socioeconomic status and cognitive ability and performance are typically quite significant (Gottfried, Gottfried, Bathurst, Guerin, & Parramore, 2003) and persist throughout the stages of development, from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood (see Figure 2.4). But these are data, not destiny. The good news is that brains are designed to change.

Theory and Research

To function at school, the brain uses an overarching "operating system" that comprises a collection of neurocognitive systems enabling students to pay attention, work hard, process and sequence content, and think critically (see Figure 2.5). Five key systems are

The prefrontal/executive system. This system, which engages the prefrontal cortex, includes our capacity to defer gratification, create plans, make decisions, and hold thoughts in mind. It also allows us to "reset" our brains' rules for how to behave. For example, we might have one set of rules for how to behave to our families and another set of rules for how to respond to strangers.

The left perisylvian/language system. This system, which engages the temporal and frontal areas of the left brain hemisphere, encompasses semantic, syntactic, and phonological aspects of language. It is the foundation for our reading, pronunciation, spelling, and writing skills.

The medial temporal/memory system. This system allows us to process explicit learning (text, spoken words, and pictures) and, if appropriate, store that learning. It includes our "indexing" structure (the hippocampus) and our emotional processor (the amygdala).

The parietal/spatial cognition system. This system underlies our ability to mentally represent and manipulate the spatial relations among objects and primarily engages the posterior parietal cortex. This brain area is especially important for organizing, sequencing, and visualizing information. It is essential for mathematics and music and for feeling a sense of organization.

The occipitotemporal/visual cognition system. This system is responsible for pattern recognition and visual mental imagery, translating mental images into more abstract representations of object shape and identity, and reciprocally translating visual memory knowledge into mental images (Gardini, Cornoldi, De Beni, & Venneri, 2008).

The value of understanding "where" in the brain vital processes occur cannot be overstated; there are significant contrasts in these key systems between the brains of lower-SES and higher-SES individuals.

With the advent of cognitive neuroscience, it has become possible to assess these systems more selectively. One study (Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005) examined the neurocognitive performance of 30 low-SES and 30 well-off African American kindergartners in the Philadelphia public schools. The children were tested on a battery of tasks adapted from the cognitive neuroscience literature, designed to assess the functioning of the aforementioned key neurocognitive systems. This was one of the first studies that showed both global and specific brain differences between lower-income and higher-income children. Another study (Farah et al., 2006) assessed middle schoolers' working memory and cognitive control and also found significant disparities between lower-income and higher-income students in the five neurocognitive areas. I'm often asked, "Has anyone actually scanned the brains of low-SES children and contrasted them with those of higher-SES children?" Yes, it has been done. And when the data are compiled and viewed by effect size, the areas of difference become dramatic (see Figure 2.6).

In another study (Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007), 150 healthy, socioeconomically diverse 1st graders were administered tasks tapping language skills, visual-spatial skills, memory, working memory, cognitive control, and reward processing. Socioeconomic status accounted for more than 30 percent of the variance in the left perisylvian/language system and a smaller but significant portion of the variance in most other systems.

One possible explanation of the strong association between socioeconomic status and language is that the perisylvian brain regions involved in language processing undergo a more protracted course of maturation in vivo (i.e., once the child is born) than any other neural region (Sowell et al., 2003). It is possible that a longer period of development leaves the language system more susceptible to environmental influences (Noble et al., 2005).

For example, we have discovered that the quantity, quality, and context of parents' speech matter a great deal (Hoff, 2003). Children's vocabulary competence is influenced by the mother's socio-demographic characteristics, personal characteristics, vocabulary, and knowledge of child development (Bornstein, Haynes, & Painter, 1998). By the time most children start school, they will have been exposed to 5 million words and should know about 13,000 of them. By high school, they should know about 60,000 to 100,000 words (Huttenlocher, 1998). But that doesn't often happen in low-income homes. Weizman and Snow (2001) found that low-income caregivers speak in shorter, more grammatically simple sentences. There is less back-and-forth- fewer questions asked and fewer explanations given. As a result, children raised in poverty experience a more limited range of language capabilities. Figures 2.7 and 2.8 illustrate how parents' speech affects their children's vocabulary.

At the preschool level, inattention from care providers has a huge impact on the child's developing language skills and future IQ scores. A six-year study by Hart and Risley (1995) that followed the outcomes of children selected from different socioeconomic backgrounds found that by age 3, the children of professional parents were adding words to their vocabularies at about twice the rate of children in welfare families. Both the quantity and the quality of phrases directed at the children by caregivers correlated directly with income levels. They found that a pattern of slow vocabulary growth helped put in place a slower cognitive pattern by the time children turned 3. In fact, IQ tests performed later in childhood showed the welfare students' scores trailing behind those of the more affluent children by up to 29 percent. Parents of low socioeconomic status are also less likely to tailor their conversations to evoke thoughtful and reasoned responses from their children.

Going hand in hand with language acquisition, reading is one of the most important factors affecting the development of a child's brain. Reading skills are not hardwired into the human brain; every subskill of reading, including (but not limited to) phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary, phonics, and comprehension, must be explicitly taught. This teaching requires attention, focus, and motivation from the primary caregiver. Again, the time and expertise to make this happen are unfortunately in short supply among poor families. Evidence suggests that poverty adversely alters the trajectory of the developing reading brain (Noble, Wolmetz, Ochs, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006).

Even when low-income parents do everything they can for their children, their limited resources put kids at a huge disadvantage. The growing human brain desperately needs coherent, novel, challenging input, or it will scale back its growth trajectory. When a child is neglected, the brain does not grow as much (De Bellis, 2005; Grassi-Oliveira, Ashy, & Stein, 2008). Unfortunately, low-SES children overall receive less cognitive stimulation than middle-income children do. For example, they are less likely to be read to by parents: Coley (2002) found that only 36 percent of low-income parents read to their kindergarten-age children each day, compared with 62 percent of upper-income parents. In addition, low-SES children are less likely to be coached in learning skills or helped with homework, and they are half as likely as their well-off peers to be taken to museums (Bradley, Corwyn, Burchinal et al., 2001; Bradley, Corwyn, McAdoo et al., 2001) and on other culturally enriching outings. They also have fewer play areas in their homes; have less access to computers and the Internet (and use them in less sophisticated ways); own fewer books, toys, and other recreational or learning materials; spend more time watching television; and are less likely to have friends over to play (Evans, 2004). Low-income parents' financial limitations often exclude their kids from healthy after-school activities, such as music, athletics, dance, or drama (Bracey, 2006).

Effects on School Behavior and Performance

Many children raised in poverty enter school a step behind their well-off peers. The cognitive stimulation parents provide in the early childhood years is crucial, and as we have seen, poor children receive less of it than their well-off peers do. These deficits have been linked to underdeveloped cognitive, social, and emotional competence in later childhood and have been shown to be increasingly important influences on vocabulary growth, IQ, and social skills (Bradley, Corwyn, Burchinal et al., 2001; Bradley, Corwyn, McAdoo et al., 2001). Standardized intelligence tests show a correlation between poverty and lower cognitive achievement, and low-SES kids often earn below-average scores in reading, math, and science and demonstrate poor writing skills. Although the effects of poverty are not automatic or fixed, they often set in motion a vicious and stubborn cycle of low expectations. Poor academic performance often leads to diminished expectations, which spread across the board and undermine children's overall self-esteem.

The dramatic socioeconomic divide in education doesn't help matters. High-poverty, high-minority schools receive significantly less state and local money than do more prosperous schools, and students in such schools are more likely to be taught by teachers who are inexperienced or teaching outside their specialties (Jerald, 2001) (see Figure 2.9). This gap is most evident in the subjects of math and reading.

Constantino (2005) examined six communities in the greater Los Angeles, California, area and found that children in high-income communities had access to significantly more books than children in low-income communities did. In fact, she found that in some affluent communities, children had more books in their homes than low-SES children had in all school sources combined. Milne and Plourde (2006) identified six 2nd graders who came from low-income households but demonstrated high achievement and found that these children's parents provided educational materials, implemented and engaged in structured reading and study time, limited television viewing, and emphasized the importance of education. The researchers concluded that many of the factors of low socioeconomic status that negatively affect student academic success could be overcome by better educating parents about these essential needs.

The composite of academic skills needed for school success is actually a short list. I have introduced these skills as chunks scattered throughout this chapter. In Chapter 3, I list them together as an aggregate of subskills I call the fundamental "operating system" for academic success.

Action Steps

Build core skills. When students underperform academically, teachers can use assessments as an initial roadmap to ascertain the range and depth of skill building they need. Of course, assessments don't measure every skill that students need to succeed in school. Those core skills include

Attention and focus skills.

Short- and long-term memory.

Sequencing and processing skills.

Problem-solving skills.

Perseverance and ability to apply skills in the long term.

Social skills.

Hopefulness and self-esteem.

Once you determine which skills your students most need to hone, create a plan, find a program, and allocate the resources. Later in this book, I address the logistics of implementing an intervention program. Some of the most important skills teachers should foster are social skills and problem-solving skills. When schools teach kids the social skills to resist peer pressure, for example, students stay in school longer, do better academically, and get in less trouble (Wright, Nichols, Graber, Brooks-Gunn, & Botvin, 2004). It is also essential to explicitly teach and model problem-solving skills and provide feedback to students. Here's an example of an established problem-solving process you can post in the classroom:

1. Identify and define the problem.

2. Brainstorm solutions.

3. Evaluate each solution with a checklist or rubric.

4. Implement the selected solution.

5. Follow up and debrief on the results to learn.

In addition to posting a model, you can create simple case studies with real-world problems for students to solve. For example, "You are leaving a shopping mall with friends late at night. Your friend is supposed to do the driving. But as far as you can tell, he looks pretty wasted. You have to get home soon or you'll get in trouble. What do you do?"

Pinpoint assessments. Helping to improve students' cognitive abilities and academic performance takes more than just knowing that a student is behind in a given area. For example, with reading skills, you'll want to find out if the student's difficulty is rooted in

Quality assessment is essential, but follow-through is even more important. Pinpointed assessments are crucial to determine areas of strength and weakness. For example, the Woodcock-Johnson III Diagnostic Reading Battery can reveal specific areas that need targeted practice.

Provide hope and support. Any student who feels "less than" cognitively is likely not only to struggle academically, but also to be susceptible to such secondary issues as acting out, getting bullied or becoming a bully, having lower self-esteem, or having feelings of depression or helplessness. Ensure that teachers build supportive relationships, provide positive guidance, foster hope and optimism, and take time for affirmation and celebration.

Although the cognitive deficits in children from low-income families can seem daunting, the strategies available today are far more targeted and effective than ever before. Kids from all over the United States can succeed with the right interventions. I discuss these further in Chapters 4 and 5.

Recruit and train the best staff you can. You cannot afford to let disadvantaged kids receive substandard teaching. A Boston Public Schools (1998) study of the effects of teachers found that in one academic year, the top third of teachers produced as much as six times the learning growth as the bottom third of teachers did. Tenth graders taught by the least effective teachers made almost no gains in reading and even lost ground in math. To find superior teachers, start asking around the district and at conferences, post ads for teachers who love kids and love challenges, and ask the existing good teachers at your school, "How do we keep you here?" Recruiting great teachers is never easy, but it is possible if you know how to appeal to them. Top teachers crave challenge and workplace flexibility and look for highly supportive administrators. They continually strive to upgrade their skills and knowledge by participating in staff development, attending out-of-town conferences, and seeking out printed materials or DVDs. Appeal to their values and specify what you can offer.

Health and Safety Issues

As we have seen, low-SES children are often subject to such health and safety issues as malnutrition, environmental hazards, and insufficient health care. Health and achievement overlap: every cell in our body needs a healthy environment to function optimally. When a body's cells are besieged daily by stressors, they slow their growth trajectory and contract. Kids raised in poverty have more cells in their body "under siege" than do kids from middle- or upper-income families. The consequent adaptations that these kids' immune systems make diminish their ability to concentrate, learn, and behave appropriately.

Theory and Research

Stanford neuroscientist and stress expert Robert Sapolsky (2005) found that the lower a child's socioeconomic status is, the lower his or her overall health. Substandard housing in low-income neighborhoods leaves children exposed to everything from greater pedestrian risks (heavier traffic on narrower streets) to environmental hazards (exposure to radon and carbon monoxide) (Evans, 2004). Poor housing quality may cause respiratory morbidity and childhood injuries (Matte & Jacobs, 2000) and may elevate psychological distress in children (Evans, Wells, & Moch, 2003). Poor children are more likely to live in old and inadequately maintained housing and to be exposed to lead in peeling paint (Sargent et al., 1995)-a factor associated with decreased IQ (Schwartz, 1994). And, as with other risk factors, these negative environmental effects synergize with and build on one another (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002).

The lower parents' income is, the more likely it is that children will be born premature, low in birth weight, or with disabilities (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). Expectant mothers living in poverty are more likely to live or work in hazardous environments; to be exposed to pesticides (Moses et al., 1993); and to smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs during pregnancy, all factors linked to prenatal issues and birth defects (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002) and adverse cognitive outcomes in children (Chasnoff et al., 1998).

Children from low-income families have generally poorer physical health than do their more affluent peers. In particular, there is a higher incidence of such conditions as asthma (Gottlieb, Beiser, & O'Connor, 1995), respiratory infections (Simoes, 2003), tuberculosis (Rogers & Ginzberg, 1993), ear infections and hearing loss (Menyuk, 1980), and obesity (Wang & Zhang, 2006). Contributing factors include poor nutrition (Bridgman & Phillips, 1998), unhealthy environmental conditions, and inability to obtain appropriate health care. Children with no health insurance may receive little or no treatment for illnesses and are far more likely to die from injuries or infections than are well-off children (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). In addition, early health conditions may have significant long-term consequences, even if children's socioeconomic status improves later in life (McLoyd, 1998). Further, Broadman (2004) found that a significant portion of health differentials across neighborhoods (high- and low-income) could be explained by the disparate levels of stress across these neighborhoods.

Effects on School Behavior and Performance

The greater incidence of health issues among lower-income students leads to increased

School absences.

Duration of school absences.

Tardiness rates.

Incidents of illness during class.

Rates of undiagnosed and/or untreated health problems or disabilities.

Each of these issues can occur among middle- and upper-income students, but they are both more common and more severe among students living in poverty. As a result, low-SES kids are often missing key classroom content and skills. Teachers may see students as uncaring or uninterested, when the real issue is that they're not in class enough to keep up.

Action Steps

Increase health-related services. Lower-income students face a daunting array of health issues. Successful schools understand these challenges and provide wide-ranging support and accommodations. Such support may include

There are serious limitations on what schools can and should do about student health. But all of us understand that when we don't feel right, it's hard to listen, concentrate, and learn. Successful schools find ways to ensure that students have a fighting chance to get and stay healthy.

Develop an enrichment counterattack. A compelling body of research (Dobrossy & Dunnett, 2004; Green, Melo, Christensen, Ngo, & Skene, 2006; Guilarte, Toscano, McGlothan, & Weaver, 2003; Nithianantharajah & Hannan, 2006) suggests that early exposure to toxins, maternal stress, trauma, alcohol, and other negatives can be ameliorated with environmental enrichment. The better the school environment is, the less the child's early risk factors will impair his or her academic success. An enrichment school

The whole point of school ought to be to enrich the life of every student. Enrichment does not mean "more" or "faster" schooling. It means rich, balanced, sustained, positive, and contrasting learning environments. That's what will change students' lives over the long haul (see Figure 2.10).

Beating the Odds

This chapter has painted a bleak picture of children raised in poverty. Certainly not all children raised in poverty experience the brain and behavioral changes described in this chapter, but we have seen that an aggregation of disadvantages creates a difficult web of negatives. Poverty penetrates deeper into the body, brain, and soul than many of us realize.

A childhood spent in poverty often sets the stage for a lifetime of setbacks. Secure attachments and stable environments, so vitally important to the social and emotional development of young children, are often denied to our neediest kids. These children experience more stress due to loneliness, aggression, isolation, and deviance in their peer relationships, and they are more likely to describe feeling deprived, embarrassed, picked on, or bullied. As a result, they more often face future struggles in marital and other relationships.

However, research (Hill, Bromell, Tyson, & Flint, 2007) suggests that although the first five years of a child's life are very important, there is tremendous opportunity during the school years for significant transformation. Low-SES children's behavior is an adaptive response to a chronic condition of poverty, but a brain that is susceptible to adverse environmental effects is equally susceptible to positive, enriching effects. You'll learn more about how brains can change for the better in Chapter 3.

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How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance

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by Eric Jensen In Chapter 1, we were introduced to history teacher Chris Hawkins. The family Mr. Hawkins grew up in was far from poor: his father was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, and his mother was a store manager.

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Proceedings of the 2017 4th International Conference on Education, Management and Computing Technology

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Proceedings of the 2017 4th International Conference on Education, Management and Computing Technology

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Different manifestations of the psychological poverty of poor students in universities were listed in the paper.

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Research on the factors and countermeasures of psychological poverty of poor students in colleges and universities | Atlantis Press

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Different manifestations of the psychological poverty of poor students in universities were listed in the paper. The social and psychological factors that cause these manifestations are analyzed.based on summarizing the problems and puts forward how to resolve psychological poverty and poor college students with poor psychological coping strategies.On...

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A survey of the enrollment rate of poor students, poverty usually begins in high school.

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The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children.

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The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children.

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Persistent socioeconomic disadvantage has a negative impact on the life outcomes of many Canadian children.

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Abstract

Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child's educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.

Depuis dix ans, l'écart des revenus s'est creusé entre les familles canadiennes, ce qui est une triste réalité. L'éducation est l'un des principaux domaines sur lesquels influe le revenu familial. Souvent, lorsqu'ils commencent l'école, les enfants de familles à faible revenu accusent déjà un retard par rapport à leurs camarades qui proviennent de familles plus aisées, tel que le démontrent les mesures de maturité scolaire. L'incidence, l'importance, la durée et le moment de la pauvreté ont tous une influence sur le rendement scolaire de l'enfant, de même que les caractéristiques de la communauté et les réseaux sociaux. Cependant, tant au Canada que sur la scène internationale, il est possible de réduire les effets de la pauvreté au moyen d'interventions soutenues. Les pédiatres et les médecins de familles ont de nombreuses occasions d'agir sur la maturité et la réussite scolaire dans le cadre des soins de premier recours.

Poverty remains a stubborn fact of life even in rich countries like Canada. In particular, the poverty of our children has been a continuing concern. In 1989, the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by 2000 ( 1). However, the reality is that, in 2003, one of every six children still lived in poverty. Not only have we been unsuccessful at eradicating child poverty, but over the past decade, the inequity of family incomes in Canada has grown ( 2), and for some families, the depth of poverty has increased as well ( 3). Canadian research confirms poverty's negative influence on student behaviour, achievement and retention in school ( 4).

Persistent socioeconomic disadvantage has a negative impact on the life outcomes of many Canadian children. Research from the Ontario Child Health Study in the mid-1980s reported noteworthy associations between low income and psychiatric disorders ( 5), social and academic functioning ( 6), and chronic physical health problems ( 7). Since that time, Canada has developed systematic measures that have enabled us to track the impact of a variety of child, family and community factors on children's well-being. The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) developed by Statistics Canada, Human Resources Development Canada and a number of researchers across the country was started in 1994 with the intention of following representative samples of children to adulthood ( 8). Much of our current knowledge about the development of Canadian children is derived from the analysis of the NLSCY data by researchers in a variety of settings.

One of the key areas influenced by family income is educational outcomes. The present article provides a brief review of the literature concerning the effects of poverty on educational outcomes focusing on Canadian research. Canadian data are placed in the perspective of research from other 'rich' countries. We conclude with some suggestions about what we can do, as advocates and practitioners, to work toward reducing the negative impact of economic disadvantage on the educational outcomes of our children.

POVERTY AND READINESS FOR SCHOOL

School readiness reflects a child's ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills (9). It is well documented that poverty decreases a child's readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods. Six poverty-related factors are known to impact child development in general and school readiness in particular. They are the incidence of poverty, the depth of poverty, the duration of poverty, the timing of poverty (eg, age of child), community characteristics (eg, concentration of poverty and crime in neighborhood, and school characteristics) and the impact poverty has on the child's social network (parents, relatives and neighbors). A child's home has a particularly strong impact on school readiness. Children from low-income families often do not receive the stimulation and do not learn the social skills required to prepare them for school. Typical problems are parental inconsistency (with regard to daily routines and parenting), frequent changes of primary caregivers, lack of supervision and poor role modelling. Very often, the parents of these children also lack support.

Canadian studies have also demonstrated the association between low-income households and decreased school readiness. A report by Thomas ( 10) concluded that children from lower income households score significantly lower on measures of vocabulary and communication skills, knowledge of numbers, copying and symbol use, ability to concentrate and cooperative play with other children than children from higher income households. Janus et al ( 11) found that schools with the largest proportion of children with low school readiness were from neighbourhoods of high social risk, including poverty. Willms ( 12) established that children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) households scored lower on a receptive vocabulary test than higher SES children. Thus, the evidence is clear and unanimous that poor children arrive at school at a cognitive and behavioural disadvantage. Schools are obviously not in a position to equalize this gap. For instance, research by The Institute of Research and Public Policy (Montreal, Quebec) showed that differences between students from low and high socioeconomic neighbourhoods were evident by grade 3; children from low socioeconomic neighbourhoods were less likely to pass a grade 3 standards test ( 13).

POVERTY AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Studies emanating from successive waves of the NLSCY have repeatedly shown that socioeconomic factors have a large, pervasive and persistent influence over school achievement ( 14- 16). Phipps and Lethbridge ( 15) examined income and child outcomes in children four to 15 years of age based on data from the NLSCY. In this study, higher incomes were consistently associated with better outcomes for children. The largest effects were for cognitive and school measures (teacher-administered math and reading scores), followed by behavioural and health measures, and then social and emotional measures, which had the smallest associations.

These Canadian findings are accompanied by a large number of studies in the United States that have shown that socioeconomic disadvantage and other risk factors that are associated with poverty (eg, lower parental education and high family stress) have a negative effect on cognitive development and academic achievement, smaller effects on behaviour and inconsistent effects on socioemotional outcomes ( 17- 19). Living in extreme and persistent poverty has particularly negative effects ( 18), although the consequences of not being defined below the poverty line but still suffering from material hardship should not be underestimated ( 20). Furthermore, American studies found strong interaction effects between SES and exposure to risk factors. For instance, parents from disadvantaged backgrounds were not only more likely to have their babies born prematurely, but these prematurely born children were also disproportionately at higher risk for school failure than children with a similar neonatal record from higher income families ( 18).

It is worth noting that international studies have consistently shown similar associations between socioeconomic measures and academic outcomes. For example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessed the comprehensive literacy skills of grade 4 students in 35 countries. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessed reading, math and science scores of 15-year-old children in 43 countries ( 21). At these two different stages of schooling, there was a significant relationship between SES and educational measure in all countries. This relationship has come to be known as a 'socioeconomic gradient'; flatter gradients represent greater 'equity of outcome', and are generally associated with better average outcomes and a higher quality of life. Generally, the PISA and the NLSCY data support the conclusion that income or SES has important effects on educational attainment in elementary school through high school. Despite the results shown by the PISA and the NLSCY, schools are not the ultimate equalizer and the socioeconomic gradient still exists despite educational attainment. Test results can be misleading and can mask the gradient if the sample does not account for all children who should be completing the test. A study ( 13) completed by the Institute of Research and Public Policy demonstrated only small differences between low and high socioeconomic students when test results were compared in those students who sat for the examination. However, when results were compared for the entire body of children who should have written the examination, the differences between low and high socioeconomic students were staggering, mainly due to the over-representation of those who left school early in the low socioeconomic group.

Longitudinal studies carried out in the United States have been crucial in demonstrating some of the key factors in producing and maintaining poor achievement. Their findings have gone well beyond a model that blames schools or a student's background for academic failure. Comparisons of the academic growth curves of students during the school year and over the summer showed that much of the achievement gap between low and high SES students could be related to their out-of-school environment (families and communities). This result strongly supports the notion that schools play a crucial compensatory role; however, it also shows the importance of continued support for disadvantaged students outside of the school environment among their families and within their communities (22).

A Human Resource Development Canada study ( 23) titled "The Cost of Dropping Out of High School" reported that lower income students were more likely to leave school without graduating, which agrees with international data. In a nonrandom sample for a qualitative study, Ferguson et al ( 24) reported that one-half of Ontario students leaving high school before graduating were raised in homes with annual incomes lower than $30,000. Finally, in Canada, only 31% of youth from the bottom income quartile attended postsecondary education compared with 50.2% in the top income quartile ( 25). Once again, the evidence indicates that students from low-income families are disadvantaged right through the education system to postsecondary training.

REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF POVERTY

The negative effects of poverty on all levels of school success have been widely demonstrated and accepted; the critical question for us as a caring society is, can these effects be prevented or reversed? A variety of data are relevant to this question, and recent research gives us reason to be both positive and proactive.

Early intervention

There is a direct link between early childhood intervention and increased social and cognitive ability ( 26). Decreasing the risk factors in a child's environment increases a child's potential for development and educational attainment. Prevention and intervention programs that target health concerns (eg, immunization and prenatal care) are associated with better health outcomes for low-income children and result in increased cognitive ability ( 27). However, it is the parent-child relationship that has been proven to have the greatest influence on reversing the impact of poverty. Both parenting style ( 28) and parental involvement, inside and outside of the school environment ( 29), impact on a child's early development. Characteristics of parenting such as predictability of behaviour, social responsiveness, verbal behaviour, mutual attention and positive role modelling have been shown to have a positive effect on several aspects of child outcome. Parental involvement, such as frequency of outings ( 29) and problem-based play, creates greater intellectual stimulation and educational support for a child, and develops into increased school readiness ( 26).

Interventions act to advance a child's development through a range of supports and services. Their underlying goal is to develop the skills lacking in children, that have already developed in other children who are of a similar age. There is general agreement that interventions should be data driven, and that assessments and interventions should be closely linked. A primary evaluation of a child and family support systems is, therefore, pivotal in the creation of individualized interventions to ensure success in placing children on a normative trajectory ( 30). Ramey and Ramey ( 30) determined that interventions have sustained success for children when they increase intellectual skills, create motivational changes, create greater environmental opportunities and/or increase continued access to supports.

Karoly et al (31) reported the magnitude of effects that early intervention programs have on children. Measured at school entry, they found a pooled mean effect size of around 0.3, with many programs having effect sizes between 0.5 and 0.97. This means that for many interventions, children in the program were, on average, one-half to a full standard deviation above their peers who were not in the program. Interestingly, they found that interventions that combined parent education programs with child programs had significantly higher effect sizes. Furthermore, interventions that continued beyond the early years showed significantly lower fade-out effects. The results strongly support the notion that early interventions should include the whole family and be continued beyond the early years. Constant evaluation of interventions should be completed to ensure that the benefits for children are maximized using these key components.

Highly regarded early interventions

The High/Scope active learning approach is a comprehensive early childhood curriculum. It uses cooperative work and communication skills to have children 'learn by doing'. Individual, and small and large group formats are used for teacher-and-child planned activities in the key subject areas of language and literacy, mathematics, science, music and rhythmic movement. There has been ongoing evaluation of the approach since 1962 using 123 low-income African-American children at high risk of school failure (32). Fifty-eight children received high-quality early care and an educational setting, as well as home visits from the teachers to discuss their developmental progress. By 40 years of age, children who received the intervention were more likely to have graduated high school, hold a job, have higher earnings and have committed fewer crimes.

Similar positive effects of preschool intervention were found in the evaluation of the Abecedarian project (33). This project enlisted children between infancy and five years of age from low-income families to receive a high-quality educational intervention that was individualized to their needs. The intervention used games focused on social, emotional and cognitive areas of development. Children were evaluated at 12, 15 and 21 years of age, and those who had received the intervention had higher cognitive test scores, had greater academic achievement in reading and math, had completed more years of education and were more likely to have attended a four-year college. Interestingly, the mothers of children participating in the program also had higher educational and employment status after the intervention.

One of the oldest and most eminent early intervention programs is the Chicago Child Parent Center program. The intervention targets students who are between preschool and grade 3 through language-based activities, outreach activities, ongoing staff development and health services. Importantly, there is no set curriculum; the program is tailored to the needs of each child ( 34). One crucial feature of the program is the extensive involvement of parents. Multifaceted parental programs are offered to improve parental knowledge, their engagement in their children's education and their parental skills. An evaluation of the Chicago Child Parent Center Program was completed by Reynolds ( 34) using a sample of 1106 black children from low-income families. They were exposed to the intervention in preschool, kindergarten and follow-up components. Two years after the completion of the intervention, the results indicated that the duration of intervention was associated with greater academic achievement in reading and mathematics, teacher ratings of school adjustment, parental involvement in school activities, grade retention and special education placement ( 34). Evaluation of the long-term effects of the intervention was completed by Reynolds ( 35) after 15 years of follow-up. Individuals who had participated in the early childhood intervention for at least one or two years had higher rates of school completion, had attained more years of education, and had lower rates of juvenile arrests, violent arrests leaving school early.

Later intervention

A common question concerns the stage at which it is too late for interventions to be successful. Recent findings (N Rowen, personal communication) from an uncontrolled community study in Toronto, Ontario, have suggested that a multisys-temic intervention as students transition to high school can produce dramatic results. The Pathways to Education project began because of a community (parents) request to a local health agency to help their children succeed in high school. The community consisted mainly of people from a public housing complex, with the majority of families being poor, immigrants and from visible minority groups. The Pathways project grew out of a partnership between the community, the health centre and the school board, and was funded by a variety of sources. The core elements of the program include a contract between the student, parents and project; student-parent support workers who advocate for the student at school and connect parents to the project and/or school; four nights a week of tutoring (by volunteers) in the community; group and career mentoring located in the community; and financial support, such as money for public transit and scholarship money for postsecondary education dependent on successful academic work and graduation. The Pathways project has been running for six years, and the results for the first five cohorts of students have been exciting. In comparison to a preproject cohort, the absentee and academic 'at-risk' rate (credit accumulation) has fallen by 50% to 60%, the 'dropout' rate has fallen by 80% to a level below the average for the board of education and the five-year graduation rate has risen from 42% to 75%. Of the graduates, 80% go on to college or university, compared with 42% before the Pathways project. While these initial results must be replicated in other communities, they suggest that, even at the high school level, interventions can be startlingly effective, even in a community with a long history of poverty, recent immigration and racism. As the proponents of Pathways move to replication, they will need to be careful to untangle the effects of community commitment, school board collaboration and the rich set of collaborations that have been a hallmark of this first demonstration project. Nevertheless, Pathways has made it clear that Canadian communities possess the capacity to change the education outcomes of their children and youth. While it takes resolve and resources to achieve such effects, initial analysis suggests that over the lifetime of the students, each dollar invested will be returned to Canada more than 24 times (36)!

Schools make a difference

Canadian and international research on educational outcomes has revealed important data on the effects of schools and classrooms. Frempong and Willms ( 37) used complex analyses of student performance in mathematics to demonstrate that Canadian schools, and even classrooms, do make a difference in student outcomes (ie, students from similar home backgrounds achieve significantly different levels of performance in different schools). Furthermore, schools and classrooms differ in their SES gradients (ie, some schools achieve not just higher scores, but more equitable outcomes than others). These general findings were corroborated by Willms ( 38) using reading scores from children in grade 4 and those 15 years of age from 34 countries. Once again, it was demonstrated that schools make a difference and that some schools are more equitable than others. According to Thomas ( 10), activities other than academics, such as sports and lessons in the arts, have been shown to increase student's school readiness despite SES. These activities should be encouraged in all schools to maximize school readiness. A key to making schools more effective at raising the performance of low SES students is to keep schools heterogeneous with regard to the SES of their students (ie, all types of streaming result in markedly poor outcomes for disadvantaged children and youth).

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Balancing the consistent evidence about the pervasive negative impact of poverty on educational outcomes with the hopeful positive outcomes of intervention studies, what can we do in our communities to attenuate the effects of poverty and SES on academic success? Here are some important actions:

Advocate for and support schools which strive to achieve equity of outcomes;

Advocate for and support intervention programs that provide academic, social and community support to raise the success of disadvantaged children and youth;

Make others aware of the short-, medium- and long-term costs of allowing these children and youth to fail or leave school;

Never miss a personal opportunity to support the potential educational success of the children and youth who we come into contact with;

Advocate for system changes within schools to maximize educational attainment (eg, longer school days and shorter summer vacations); and

Advocate for quality early education and care to minimize differences between children's school readiness before entering school.

Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings. Golova et al (39) reported intriguing results from a primary care setting. They delivered a literacy promoting intervention to low-income Hispanic families in health care settings. At the initial visit (average age 7.4 months), parents received a bilingual handout explaining the benefits of reading aloud to children, literacy-related guidance from paediatric providers or an age-appropriate bilingual children's board book. Control group families received no handouts or books. At a 10-month follow-up visit (mean age 17.7 months), there was no difference between groups on a screening test for language scores; however, intervention families read more often to their children, reported greater enjoyment of reading to children and had more children's books in their homes. Given this suggestive finding, there are a number of points that paediatricians and family doctors should consider as they deliver primary care:

Observe and encourage good parenting - mutual attention and contingency of interaction (taking turns and listening to each other), verbal behaviour (amount of talking and quality), sensitivity and responsiveness (awareness to signs of hunger, fatigue, boredom and providing an appropriate response), role modelling and reading to their children;

Encourage parents to increase their knowledge of child development, particularly age-appropriate needs of and activities for their children. Explain to them, for instance, how ear infections can severely affect a student's language development, and that good nutrition and hygiene can lower the frequency and severity of infections;

Encourage parents who do not have their children in institutionalized care to attend parent-child centres and programs. These programs usually do not charge fees and require no formal arrangements. Examples are the Ontario Early Years Centres, the Aboriginal Head Start Program in Northern communities, and programs related to the Alberta Children and Youth Initiative;

Indicate the importance of parental support and networks - keep a message board in your office and post a list of community-based organizations in your neighborhood; and

Keep in mind that poverty is not always obvious. One in five low-income families is headed by a parent who works full-time all year; thus, it is often difficult to tell if a family is in need (40).

REFERENCES

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impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children

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Over the past decade, the unfortunate reality is that the income gap has widened between Canadian families. Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness.

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Poverty of parents leads to poverty of children

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As the students file out of Janet's classroom, I sit in the back corner, scribbling a few final notes. Defeat in her eyes, Janet drops into a seat next to me with a sigh.

"I love these kids," she declares, as if trying to convince me. "I adore them. But my hope is fading."

"Why's that?" I ask, stuffing my notes into a folder.

"They're smart. I know they're smart, but . . ."

And then the deficit floodgates open: "They don't care about school. They're unmotivated. And their parents-I'm lucky if two or three of them show up for conferences. No wonder the kids are unprepared to learn."

At Janet's invitation, I spent dozens of hours in her classroom, meeting her students, observing her teaching, helping her navigate the complexities of an urban midwestern elementary classroom with a growing percentage of students in poverty. I observed powerful moments of teaching and learning, caring and support. And I witnessed moments of internal conflict in Janet, when what she wanted to believe about her students collided with her prejudices.

Like most educators, Janet is determined to create an environment in which each student reaches his or her full potential. And like many of us, despite overflowing with good intentions, Janet has bought into the most common and dangerous myths about poverty.

Chief among these is the "culture of poverty" myth-the idea that poor people share more or less monolithic and predictable beliefs, values, and behaviors. For educators like Janet to be the best teachers they can be for all students, they need to challenge this myth and reach a deeper understanding of class and poverty.

Roots of the Culture of Poverty Concept

Oscar Lewis coined the term culture of poverty in his 1961 book The Children of Sanchez. Lewis based his thesis on his ethnographic studies of small Mexican communities. His studies uncovered approximately 50 attributes shared within these communities: frequent violence, a lack of a sense of history, a neglect of planning for the future, and so on. Despite studying very small communities, Lewis extrapolated his findings to suggest a universal culture of poverty. More than 45 years later, the premise of the culture of poverty paradigm remains the same: that people in poverty share a consistent and observable "culture."

Lewis ignited a debate about the nature of poverty that continues today. But just as important-especially in the age of data-driven decision making-he inspired a flood of research. Researchers around the world tested the culture of poverty concept empirically (see Billings, 1974; Carmon, 1985; Jones & Luo, 1999). Others analyzed the overall body of evidence regarding the culture of poverty paradigm (see Abell & Lyon, 1979; Ortiz & Briggs, 2003; Rodman, 1977).

These studies raise a variety of questions and come to a variety of conclusions about poverty. But on this they all agree: There is no such thing as a culture of poverty. Differences in values and behaviors among poor people are just as great as those between poor and wealthy people.

In actuality, the culture of poverty concept is constructed from a collection of smaller stereotypes which, however false, seem to have crept into mainstream thinking as unquestioned fact. Let's look at some examples.

MYTH: Poor people are unmotivated and have weak work ethics.

The Reality: Poor people do not have weaker work ethics or lower levels of motivation than wealthier people (Iversen & Farber, 1996; Wilson, 1997). Although poor people are often stereotyped as lazy, 83 percent of children from low-income families have at least one employed parent; close to 60 percent have at least one parent who works full-time and year-round (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2004). In fact, the severe shortage of living-wage jobs means that many poor adults must work two, three, or four jobs. According to the Economic Policy Institute (2002), poor working adults spend more hours working each week than their wealthier counterparts.

MYTH: Poor parents are uninvolved in their children's learning, largely because they do not value education.

The Reality: Low-income parents hold the same attitudes about education that wealthy parents do (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Lareau & Horvat, 1999; Leichter, 1978). Low-income parents are less likely to attend school functions or volunteer in their children's classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005)-not because they care less about education, but because they have less access to school involvement than their wealthier peers. They are more likely to work multiple jobs, to work evenings, to have jobs without paid leave, and to be unable to afford child care and public transportation. It might be said more accurately that schools that fail to take these considerations into account do not value the involvement of poor families as much as they value the involvement of other families.

MYTH: Poor people are linguistically deficient.

The Reality: All people, regardless of the languages and language varieties they speak, use a full continuum of language registers (Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008). What's more, linguists have known for decades that all language varieties are highly structured with complex grammatical rules (Gee, 2004; Hess, 1974; Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005). What often are assumed to be deficient varieties of English-Appalachian varieties, perhaps, or what some refer to as Black English Vernacular-are no less sophisticated than so-called "standard English."

MYTH: Poor people tend to abuse drugs and alcohol.

The Reality: Poor people are no more likely than their wealthier counterparts to abuse alcohol or drugs. Although drug sales are more visible in poor neighborhoods, drug use is equally distributed across poor, middle class, and wealthy communities (Saxe, Kadushin, Tighe, Rindskopf, & Beveridge, 2001). Chen, Sheth, Krejci, and Wallace (2003) found that alcohol consumption is significantly higher among upper middle class white high school students than among poor black high school students. Their finding supports a history of research showing that alcohol abuse is far more prevalent among wealthy people than among poor people (Diala, Muntaner, & Walrath, 2004; Galea, Ahern, Tracy, & Vlahov, 2007). In other words, considering alcohol and illicit drugs together, wealthy people are more likely than poor people to be substance abusers.

The Culture of Classism

The myth of a "culture of poverty" distracts us from a dangerous culture that does exist-the culture of classism. This culture continues to harden in our schools today. It leads the most well intentioned of us, like my friend Janet, into low expectations for low-income students. It makes teachers fear their most powerless pupils. And, worst of all, it diverts attention from what people in poverty do have in common: inequitable access to basic human rights.

The most destructive tool of the culture of classism is deficit theory. In education, we often talk about the deficit perspective-defining students by their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Deficit theory takes this attitude a step further, suggesting that poor people are poor because of their own moral and intellectual deficiencies (Collins, 1988). Deficit theorists use two strategies for propagating this world view: (1) drawing on well-established stereotypes, and (2) ignoring systemic conditions, such as inequitable access to high-quality schooling, that support the cycle of poverty.

The implications of deficit theory reach far beyond individual bias. If we convince ourselves that poverty results not from gross inequities (in which we might be complicit) but from poor people's own deficiencies, we are much less likely to support authentic antipoverty policy and programs. Further, if we believe, however wrongly, that poor people don't value education, then we dodge any responsibility to redress the gross education inequities with which they contend. This application of deficit theory establishes the idea of what Gans (1995) calls the undeserving poor -a segment of our society that simply does not deserve a fair shake.

If the goal of deficit theory is to justify a system that privileges economically advantaged students at the expense of working-class and poor students, then it appears to be working marvelously. In our determination to "fix" the mythical culture of poor students, we ignore the ways in which our society cheats them out of opportunities that their wealthier peers take for granted. We ignore the fact that poor people suffer disproportionately the effects of nearly every major social ill. They lack access to health care, living-wage jobs, safe and affordable housing, clean air and water, and so on (Books, 2004)-conditions that limit their abilities to achieve to their full potential.

Perhaps most of us, as educators, feel powerless to address these bigger issues. But the question is this: Are we willing, at the very least, to tackle the classism in our own schools and classrooms?

This classism is plentiful and well documented (Kozol, 1992). For example, compared with their wealthier peers, poor students are more likely to attend schools that have less funding (Carey, 2005); lower teacher salaries (Karoly, 2001); more limited computer and Internet access (Gorski, 2003); larger class sizes; higher student-to-teacher ratios; a less-rigorous curriculum; and fewer experienced teachers (Barton, 2004). The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (2004) also found that low-income schools were more likely to suffer from cockroach or rat infestation, dirty or inoperative student bathrooms, large numbers of teacher vacancies and substitute teachers, more teachers who are not licensed in their subject areas, insufficient or outdated classroom materials, and inadequate or nonexistent learning facilities, such as science labs.

Here in Minnesota, several school districts offer universal half-day kindergarten but allow those families that can afford to do so to pay for full-day services. Our poor students scarcely make it out of early childhood without paying the price for our culture of classism. Deficit theory requires us to ignore these inequities-or worse, to see them as normal and justified.

What does this mean? Regardless of how much students in poverty value education, they must overcome tremendous inequities to learn. Perhaps the greatest myth of all is the one that dubs education the "great equalizer." Without considerable change, it cannot be anything of the sort.

What Can We Do?

The socioeconomic opportunity gap can be eliminated only when we stop trying to "fix" poor students and start addressing the ways in which our schools perpetuate classism. This includes destroying the inequities listed above as well as abolishing such practices as tracking and ability grouping, segregational redistricting, and the privatization of public schools. We must demand the best possible education for all students-higher-order pedagogies, innovative learning materials, and holistic teaching and learning. But first, we must demand basic human rights for all people: adequate housing and health care, living-wage jobs, and so on.

Of course, we ought not tell students who suffer today that, if they can wait for this education revolution, everything will fall into place. So as we prepare ourselves for bigger changes, we must

Educate ourselves about class and poverty.

Reject deficit theory and help students and colleagues unlearn misperceptions about poverty.

Make school involvement accessible to all families.

Follow Janet's lead, inviting colleagues to observe our teaching for signs of class bias.

Continue reaching out to low-income families even when they appear unresponsive (and without assuming, if they are unresponsive, that we know why).

Respond when colleagues stereotype poor students or parents.

Never assume that all students have equitable access to such learning resources as computers and the Internet, and never assign work requiring this access without providing in-school time to complete it.

Ensure that learning materials do not stereotype poor people.

Fight to keep low-income students from being assigned unjustly to special education or low academic tracks.

Make curriculum relevant to poor students, drawing on and validating their experiences and intelligences.

Teach about issues related to class and poverty-including consumer culture, the dissolution of labor unions, and environmental injustice-and about movements for class equity.

Teach about the antipoverty work of Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, the Black Panthers, César Chávez, and other U.S. icons-and about why this dimension of their legacies has been erased from our national consciousness.

Fight to ensure that school meal programs offer healthy options.

Examine proposed corporate-school partnerships, rejecting those that require the adoption of specific curriculums or pedagogies.

Most important, we must consider how our own class biases affect our interactions with and expectations of our students. And then we must ask ourselves, Where, in reality, does the deficit lie? Does it lie in poor people, the most disenfranchised people among us? Does it lie in the education system itself-in, as Jonathan Kozol says, the savage inequalities of our schools? Or does it lie in us-educators with unquestionably good intentions who too often fall to the temptation of the quick fix, the easily digestible framework that never requires us to consider how we comply with the culture of classism.

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The Myth of the Culture of Poverty - ASCD

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As the students file out of Janet's classroom, I sit in the back corner, scribbling a few final notes. Defeat in her eyes, Janet drops into a seat next to me with a sigh. "I love these kids," she declares, as if trying to convince me. "I adore them.

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Don't need too much pity for poor students.

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Sarah McKibben

She calls it her "assignment on earth" to pull as many kids out of poverty as possible. The first female assistant superintendent of high schools in the School District of Philadelphia, Linda Cliatt-Wayman stepped down from her role in central office to become principal of Strawberry Mansion in 2012. The inner-city high school-notorious for its drugs, gangs, and extreme violence-had been on Pennsylvania's "persistently dangerous" list for five consecutive years.

Having grown up in North Philadelphia just a few blocks away, Wayman took on the "life-saving work" of righting the injustices experienced by students in poverty. Her relentless leadership helped turn around Strawberry Mansion, raising performance and taking it off the dangerous schools list after just one year.

Wayman now runs a nonprofit to help the city's poorest students make it through high school. She is author of Lead Fearlessly, Love Hard: Finding Your Purpose and Putting It to Work, and her TED Talk on how to fix a broken school has been viewed nearly 2 million times. In the following interview, she shares what every teacher and school leader should know about educating children in poverty.
In your book, you describe how, when you first came to Strawberry Mansion, the Department of Justice held a nonviolence assembly in the school auditorium. The presenters played a video reenactment of the Columbine shooting, and your students erupted into laughter. What effect did that have on you?
At first, I sat there in amazement. I'm looking around and I'm saying to myself, What in the world is going on? I really didn't understand it at all. I thought they were being disrespectful and rude. I let the program continue, but when it was over I brought some kids to a roundtable conversation.

When they told me, "That's nothing compared to what we see on the streets each night," right then, my heart sank. And I said to myself, Oh my god. They can't even relate to the pain of other people because they're so wounded. And that changed a lot for me. I actually looked at the entire thing different. That all of the violence, all of the disrespect, all of the walking the halls, all of the assaults-it all came because they were in this deep state of hopelessness.

It was their reaction to that film that made me say, OK, yes, they need rules. They need consequences. But they need some fun and a whole lot of love. It was the only way for me to turn the school around.
Speaking of love, you ended your morning and afternoon announcements by saying, "If nobody told you they loved you today, remember I do, and I always will." Why was that message so important to communicate?
The teachers brought a young girl to me one day who was being very, very rude in class. And the young girl just told me, "Stop talking to me, Ms. Wayman. Will you please stop talking to me because nobody loves me. Nobody on this earth loves me." And I just sat back in my chair, and I couldn't believe that she thought nobody on this earth cared about her. And so, I got on the loudspeaker and I told them, "Look, guys, if nobody says they love you, I love you." It started there.

When I got to Strawberry Mansion, it was something I always said to my students. Strawberry Mansion was 50 times worse than my previous school, and they needed to hear it even more. My kids-13, 15, 16, 17, 18 years old-would tell me, "Ms. Wayman, nobody has ever told me they loved me." And so, it was important for me to let those students know that you are not walking around this world unloved. I'm here for you every day, the staff is here for you every day, and we absolutely love you. And we're going to show you that we love you in these ways: we're going to have high expectations for you, we're going to make sure you have the best teacher in the classroom possible, and we're going to make sure school is fun. It was something that they latched on to. They needed to hear that they were loved.
What advice do you have for teaching students in poverty, especially for teachers who have never personally experienced poverty?
I had a lot of teachers in that situation. The one thing that I would tell them is to never get it in your mind that you have to use what you see as some type of pity party for not teaching. I would always tell my teachers, "You are a teacher. No, you may not understand a lot about what their home lives are like, but you know about teaching, so I need you to go into the room, build relationships with the children, and teach to the highest level possible and expect for those kids to reach it. Because if you do that, they will."

My one teacher, Ms. Speirs, grew up in Florida and knew nothing about poverty, but she referred to her students as scholars. "You're scholars, all of you." The kids didn't even know what that meant. They said, "What is that?" So in her mind, she was already thinking, I may not know your individual situation now, but I know where you can go in the future. I see you as a doctor; I see you as a lawyer. And if I see you as that, it starts right here today, and being a scholar means making sure that essay gets done. And I'm going to show you how.

So my advice to inner-city teachers that have never dealt with this situation is to do your job and teach. Do not fall into this trap of, "But you know, they just can't do it. They're poor, they don't have this at home, they don't have that at home. I'm not going to give that assignment because many of them just can't do it." They can do everything everybody else can do if you expect it and teach it. So, I would always tell my teachers, "I need you to do one thing: teach." They said, "Ms. Wayman, why do you keep saying that?" "They need a teacher, babe. They're not worried about whether you were in poverty; they need a teacher."

Before I got to Strawberry Mansion, they were giving the kids 3rd grade books. Why are you giving the kids 3rd grade books, and they're in the 10th grade? "Well, I don't know if they're going to read it. That book got too many pages in it." So you gotta have expectations and you gotta just teach. Teach to the best of your ability and don't get so consumed by their situation. Nurture them through this situation, but the best thing you can do is see them in the future. If I can just teach them how to write this essay, I can get them here. If I can just teach them how to do these math problems, I can see them in this college. And they will rise to every expectation. It is absolutely amazing what they can do. But they're often not given the opportunity.
You put relationships at the center of everything, from teaching and learning to school safety. What does that look like in practice for a school leader?
Constantly talk to students and listen to what they have to say-and act on that. At Strawberry Mansion and in my other schools, we gave them a forum to talk. But there was never a day that I did not walk through my halls, almost every period, and say, "Hi Johnny, how you doing? I heard last week your grandmother was sick. Is your grandmother well today?" I always tried to find out a little piece of information in their daily lives that would get me to that bridge to say something to them. Or I would say, "Oh, your teacher told me you got an A on that test today. Great job!" I constantly made it my business to know something about them that would give them a reason to want to continue to talk to me. Then, when they would talk to me or ask questions, I would clearly listen to what they had to say and always follow up.

You walk through schools now, and there are kids who will tell you they don't even know their principal's name. They don't even know their name. The principal is at the top-and everybody in that building is watching what the principal does-so the principal has to build relationships, even if it's just through a daily announcement. "Hi, guys, good morning. You all look beautiful this morning, glad to see you." You have to say something to them. It's the only reason why they would continue to want to talk to you, if you get to know them as people.

And once you get to know them as people, if they're doing something wrong, you already have a relationship with them. I could walk up to someone and say, "Now Johnny, why did you just throw that on the ground?" "Oh, Ms. Wayman, I'm so sorry. That is a rule, that we keep our school clean, right?" "Yes, babe, pick the paper up." When I first walked into Strawberry Mansion, they would tell me how many ways I could "go F myself"-because that's what happened-"F you, I'm not picking up nothing. Who the H are you?" And I'm talking about hardcore situations. Schools in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles are dealing with the same type of situation I was dealing with in Philadelphia.

You have to seek out a way to personally relate to students for them to understand that you have their best interests at heart and you want them to be educated. And I would tell them that every single morning and every single afternoon: how I expect for them to get a high school diploma, how I expect for them to behave themselves, and how I expect for them to abide by the rules. It all came from me. Now, did my entire team support that work? Absolutely. We all fit together like a puzzle.
Your book shifts the focus from the challenges of educating children in poverty to what it takes to succeed in a broken system. What does an urban principal need to do to "lead fearlessly [and] love hard"?
A lot of times in high-poverty areas, school leaders believe they can lead just sitting in their office, and they have a whole bunch of APs [assistant principals] and different people running the school. It never works. It has to be a system where everybody is on the same page. Sometimes school leaders like to delegate a lot of things ..., but I've never seen that work in a high-poverty, high-violence school.

Like I always say, "If you're going to lead, then lead." You cannot delegate your work away. You have to be part of the system. You have to let everybody see you're working as hard as everybody else, and you all work together. My teachers, my god, they were beat down. They had the burden of being in those classrooms with those kids every single period. And they were very challenging children. So the one thing I had to do as a school leader was make them realize I was their main support. It's me. Whatever you're doing, whatever you need support with, you come see me, and I'm going to be the person who gets that support for you, no matter what it is.

A lot of school leaders in high-poverty areas will say, "Well, that's on you. That's your room, you figure it out." It can't go like that. Teachers need help. And they have to look at their school leader as a support for them in every area of the classroom.
Any final words of advice?
In inner-city, high-poverty, high-crime areas, the principalship is different. We cannot lead like everybody else. We have to be really personal with the kids. We have to be honest with the kids. We have to say what we mean and do what we say. And we have to expect for those kids to make it from their circumstance. If we don't believe it in our heart, that we can make a difference and change these kids' lives, then we're in the wrong seat.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah McKibben (@editorbytrade) is the managing editor of Education Update.

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Sarah McKibben She calls it her "assignment on earth" to pull as many kids out of poverty as possible. The first female assistant superintendent of high schools in the School District of Philadelphia, Linda Cliatt-Wayman stepped down from her role in central office to become principal of Strawberry Mansion in 2012.

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Topic of Poor Students in Weibo University

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Topic of Poor Students in Weibo University

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【顶酷暑赚学费 捡200个蝉蜕挣10块钱】山东宁阳的宋晓丽，今年考上青岛理工大学。爸爸去世，妈妈离家，她与71岁的爷爷相依为命，每月靠政府资助生活...为赚学费，晓丽顶酷暑捡蝉蜕，200个卖10块。@青岛理工大学团委 回应：学校已联系她，将在学费和生活费方面帮助，以及助学金等机会。 ​

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Topic of Poor Students in Facebook University

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Topic of Poor Students in Facebook University

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Student Problems. 8,179,600 likes · 3,022,215 talking about this. Student Problems is a Media Chain Group LTD brand mediachain.co

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The best journalism engages as it informs. When articles or scripts succeed at this, they often are cast as what is known as features or contain elements of a story. This course will teach students how to write compelling feature articles, substantive non-fiction stories that look to a corner of the news and illuminate it, often in human terms.

Like news, features are built from facts. Nothing in them is made up or embellished. But in features, these facts are imbedded in or interwoven with scenes and small stories that show rather than simply tell the information that is conveyed. Features are grounded in time, in place and in characters who inhabit both. Often features are framed by the specific experiences of those who drive the news or those who are affected by it. They are no less precise than news. But they are less formal and dispassionate in their structure and delivery. This class will foster a workshop environment in which students can build appreciation and skill sets for this particular journalistic craft.
Course objective
To teach students how to interest readers in significant, research-based subjects by writing about them in the context of non-fiction stories that have characters, show development and follow a structural arc from beginning to end.
Learning objectives

Explore the qualities of storytelling and how they differ from news.

Build a vocabulary of storytelling.

Apply that vocabulary to critiquing the work of top-flight journalists.

Introduce a writing process that carries a story from concept to publication.

Introduce tools for finding and framing interesting features.

Sharpen skills at focusing stories along a single, clearly articulated theme.

Evaluate the importance of backgrounding in establishing the context, focus and sources of soundly reported stories.

Analyze the connection between strong information and strong writing.

Evaluate the varied types of such information in feature writing.

Introduce and practice skills of interviewing for story as well as fact.

Explore different models and devices for structuring stories.

Conceive, report, write and revise several types of feature stories.

Teach the value of "listening" to the written word.

Learn to constructively critique and be critiqued.

Examine markets for journalism and learn how stories are sold.

Suggested reading

The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, William Blundell, Plume, 1988 (Note: While somewhat dated, this book explicitly frames a strategy for approaching the kinds of research-based, public affairs features this course encourages.)

Writing as Craft and Magic (second edition), Carl Sessions Stepp, 2007, Oxford University Press.

On Writing Well (30th anniversary edition), William Zinsser, Harper Paperbacks, 2006.

The Associated Press Stylebook 2009, Associated Press, Basic Books, 2009.

Recommended reading

America's Best Newspaper Writing, edited by Roy Peter Clark and Christopher Scanlan, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006.

Writing for Story, Jon Franklin, Penguin, 1986.

Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, Plume, 2007.

The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm, Vintage, 1990.

Writing for Your Readers, Donald Murray, Globe Pequot, 1992.

Assignments
Students will be asked to write and report only four specific stories this semester, two shorter ones, one at the beginning of the semester and one at the end, and two longer ones, a feature looking behind or beyond a news development, and an institutional or personal profile.

They will, however, be engaged in substantial writing, much of it focused on applying aspects of the writing-process method suggested herein. Throughout the class, assignments and exercises will attempt to show how approaching writing as a process that starts with a story's inception can lead to sharper story themes, stronger story reporting and more clearly defined story organization. As they report and then revise and redraft the semester's two longer assignments, students will craft theme or focus statements, write memos that help the class troubleshoot reporting weaknesses, outline, build interior scenes, workshop drafts and workshop revisions. Finally, in an attempt to place at least one of their pieces in a professional publication, an important lesson in audience and outlet, the students will draft query letters.
Methodology
This course proceeds under the assumption that students learn to report and write not only through practice (which is essential), but also by deconstructing and critiquing award-winning professional work and by reading and critiquing the work of classmates.

These workshops work best when certain rules are established:

Every student will read his or her work aloud to the class at some point during the semester. It is best that these works be distributed in advance of class.

Every student should respond to the work honestly but constructively. It is best for students to first identify what they like best about a story and then to raise questions and suggestions.

All work will be revised after it is workshopped.

Weekly schedule and exercises (13-week course)
We encourage faculty to assign students to read on their own at least the first 92 pages of William Zinsser's On Writing Well before the first class. The book is something of a contemporary gold standard for clear, consistent writing and what Zinsser calls the contract between writer and reader.

The assumption for this syllabus is that the class meets twice weekly.

Week 1: What makes feature stories different?

Previous week | Next week | Back to top

Class 1: News reports versus stories
The words "dispassionate," "factual" and "front-loaded" might best describe the traditional news story. It is written to convey information quickly to the hurried reader. Features, on the other hand, are structured and told so that readers engage in and experience a story - with a beginning, middle and end - even as they absorb new information. It is features that often are the stories emailed to friends or linked on their Facebook pages. Nothing provides more pleasure than a "good read" a story that goes beyond basic information to transport audiences to another place, to engage an audience in others' lives, to coax a smile or a tear.

This class will begin with a discussion of the differences in how journalists approach both the reporting and writing of features. In news, for example, reporters quote sources. In features, they describe characters, sometimes capturing their interaction through dialogue instead of through disembodied quotes. Other differences between news and story are summarized eloquently in the essays "Writing to Inform, Writing to Engage" and "Writing with 'Gold Coins'" on pages 302 to 304 of Clark and Scanlan's America's Best Newspaper Writing. These two essays will be incorporated in class discussion.

The second part of the introductory class will focus on writing as a continuum that begins with the inception of an idea. In its cover blurb, William Blundell's book is described as "a step-by-step guide to reporting and writing as a continuous, interrelated process."

Notes Blundell: "Before flying out the door, a reporter should consider the range of his story, its central message, the approach that appears to best fit the tale, and even the tone he should take as a storyteller." Such forethought defines not only how a story will be reported and written but the scope of both. This discussion will emphasize that framing and focusing early allows a reporter to report less broadly and more deeply, assuring a livelier and more authoritative story.

READING (assignments always are for the next class unless otherwise noted):

Blundell, Chapter 1

Clark/Scanlan, "The Process of Writing and Reporting," pages 290-294.

ASSIGNMENT:

Before journalists can capture telling details and create scenes in their feature stories, they need to get these details and scenes in their notebooks. They need, as Blundell says, to be keen observers "of the innocuous." In reporting news, journalists generally gather specific facts and elucidating quotes from sources. Rarely, however, do they paint a picture of place, or take the time to explore the emotions, the motives and the events that led up to the news. Later this semester, students will discuss and practice interviewing for story. This first assignment is designed to make them more aware of the importance of the senses in feature reporting and, ultimately, writing.

Students should read the lead five paragraphs of Hal Lancaster's piece on page 56 of Blundell and the lead of Blundell's own story on page 114. They should come prepared to discuss what each reporter needed to do to cast them, paying close attention to those parts based on pure observation and those based on interviewing.

Finally, they should differentiate between those parts of the lead that likely were based on pure observation and those that required interviewing and research. This can be done in a brief memo.

Class 2: Building observational and listening skills
Writing coach Don Fry, formerly of the Poynter Institute, used the term "gold coins" to describe those shiny nuggets of information or passages within stories that keep readers reading, even through sections based on weighty material. A gold coin can be something as simple as a carefully selected detail that surprises or charms. Or it can be an interior vignette, a small story within a larger story that gives the reader a sense of place or re-engages the reader in the story's characters.

Given the feature's propensity to apply the craft of "showing" rather than merely "telling," reporters need to expand their reporting skill set. They need to become keen observers and listeners, to boil down what they observe to what really matters, and to describe not for description's sake but to move a story forward. To use all the senses to build a tight, compelling scene takes both practice and restraint. It is neither license to write a prose-poem nor to record everything that's seen, smelled or heard. Such overwriting serves as a neon exit sign to almost any reader. Yet features that don't take readers to what Blundell calls "street level" lack vibrancy. They recount events and measure impact in the words of experts instead of in the actions of those either affected by policy, events or discovery of those who propel it.

In this session, students will analyze and then apply the skill sets of the observer, the reporter who takes his place as a fly on the wall to record and recount the scene. First students will discuss the passive observation at the heart of the stories assigned above. Why did the writers select the details they did? Are they the right ones? Why or why not?

Then students will be asked to report for about 30 to 45 minutes, to take a perch someplace - a cafeteria, a pool hall, a skateboard park, a playground, a bus stop - where they can observe and record a small scene that they will be asked to recapture in no more than 150 to 170 words. This vignette should be written in an hour or less and either handed in by the end of class or the following day.

Four fundamental rules apply:

1. The student reporters can only write what they observe or hear. They can't ask questions. They certainly can't make anything up.

2. The students should avoid all opinion. "I" should not be part of this story, either explicitly or implicitly.

3. The scene, which may record something as slight as a one-minute exchange, should waste no words. Students should choose words and details that show but to avoid words and details that show off or merely clutter.

4. Reporters should bring their lens in tight. They should write, for example, not about a playground but about the jockeying between two boys on its jungle gym.

Reading: Blundell, Chapter 1, Stepp, pages 64 to 67. Students will be assigned to read one or more feature articles built on the context of recently released research or data. The story might be told from the perspective of someone who carried out the research, someone representative of its findings or someone affected by those findings. One Pulitzer Prize-winning example is Matt Richtel's "Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit," which began a series for which The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2010. Richtel told of the dangers of cell phones and driving through the experiences of Christopher Hill, a young Oklahoma driver with a clean record who ran a light and killed someone while talking on the phone. Dan Barry's piece in The Times, "From an Oyster in the Gulf, a Domino Effect," tells the story of the BP oil spill and its impact from the perspective of one oysterman, placing his livelihood into the context of those who both service and are served by his boat.

ASSIGNMENT:

1. Finish passive observational exercise (see above).

2. Applying Blundell's criteria in Chapter 1 (extrapolation, synthesis, localization and projection), students should write a short memo that establishes what relationship, if any, exists between the features they were assigned to read and the news or research developments that preceded them. They should consider whether the reporter approached the feature from a particular point of view or perspective. If so, whose? If not, how is the story structured? And what is its main theme? Finally, students should try to identify three other ways feature writers might have framed a story based on the same research.

Week 2: The crucial early stages: Conceiving and backgrounding the story

Class 1: Finding fresh ideas
In the first half of class, several students should be asked to read their observed scenes. Writing is meant to be heard, not merely read. After each student reads a piece, the student should be asked what he or she would do to make it better. Then classmates should be encouraged to make constructive suggestions. All students should be given the opportunity to revise.

In the second half of class, students will analyze the origins of the features they were assigned to read. The class might be asked to form teams and to identify other ways of approaching the material thematically by using Blundell's methods of looking at an issue.

Feature writers, the author writes, are expected to find and frame their own ideas.

"The feature writer who doesn't have two or three projects bubbling on his own stove is doing only half a job," he writes.

Conceiving stories, Blundell notes, involves more than clear and original thought. Reporters need idea files and source files. They need to read prolifically in areas about which they know little. They need to look for areas that are under covered by their publications. They need to walk through their communities with the wonderment of tourists who have just landed in a foreign city.

This degree of organization and engagement assures reporters far greater success in applying some of Blundell's other tools of analysis.

These include:

Extrapolation - Looking for the "why" or principal cause of a story. After the explosion that killed BP workers and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, some feature stories likely told the dramatic, but relatively narrow, story of the night things went bad. Others, based on much weightier investigation, traced the series of bad decisions BP made that ultimately led to catastrophe. Both, in their way, would have been considered backgrounders to the news development.

Synthesis - Looking for common threads that can broaden a story's impact. Blundell offers the example of a series of mishaps in the city of San Diego that made the city ripe for a feature on its dubious claim to being the American capital of civic embarrassment.

Localization - Examining big events or developments in smaller ways - either by taking a national or global event and examining its impact within the writer's local area or by viewing a broad, thematic problem - post-traumatic stress disorder in the military, for example - through the experiences of an individual whose story represents the more universal experience. (In his book, Writing for Your Readers, Donald Murray writes: "Most good stories say one thing. They tell the story not of a battle, but of a soldier: they talk not about governance, but a deal; they discuss not a socioeconomic group, but reveal a person and a life." Blundell writes that it is easier for most feature writers to be miniaturists than muralists.)

Projection - Looking beyond the news development by writing a story that considers how the news affects a person or group of people. In Richtel's story about the dangers of cell phones and driving, he builds the story around one young man whose life was shaken when he ran a stop light and took a life while talking on the phone.

Conceiving a story is only the first step. The reporter must go deep to report and write the story well. "To me," Blundell writes, "the most important part of reporting is knowing what you need to make the story go."

Reading: Blundell Chapter 3 and 4

Assignment: Students should either use materials posted on the Journalist's Resource web site at the Shorenstein Center or developed at a research center at their university to identify and background a news or research development that can serve as the basis for developing a unique feature angle or approach. This feature should not profile, or tell the story of, either of an institution or an individual. Profiles will be assigned later in the semester. Instead students should look for features that either look behind a news development, such as the BP backgrounders described earlier, or features that look at the impact of a news development on those most directly affected by it or those who would be expected to translate it into policy. Students should keep in mind that they are conceiving and finding a thematic thread for a feature, not reporting a policy story filled with expert voices only. For example, if the Department of Defense releases data showing that suicides have increased in the military, the student might propose a feature like one published on page 1 of The New York Times in July 2010. It told the story of those working on a suicide hotline to keep anguished members of the military alive. The stories that grow out of this assignment should be substantial in their research and be worthy of between 1,300 and 1,500 words. They will be due in four weeks (Class 2 or Week 6).

By the second class of Week 3 students will be expected to have identified a topic and a way of approaching it that allows each to:

1. Craft a single-sentence theme statement establishing its focus.

2. Identify and obtain research-based material that will provide a specific contextual foundation for the story.

3. Provide at least four sources, with their contact information, and an explanation of why the student has chosen them.

4. Provide a brief reporting plan.

Class 2: The importance of backgrounding (starting the reporting process)
Too many students mistake reporting for a journalistic version of a police dragnet: They pull in everything they can find and then try to figure out what the story is. Such an approach results in stories riddled with holes and lacking any dominant focus. Reporting always demands lots of legwork. But that legwork must be informed by forethought, which, in turn, is informed by the process of backgrounding. Backgrounding moves a story from the conceptual stage to the point at which a reporter can draw up a well-established working thesis or plan, a focus which, while it might still change, sets the direction of future reporting and writing.

"The good writers I know always do some kind of planning before they report," writes Blundell.

Part of that planning means to review what's been written about the topic before, both to find useful information and to see what hasn't been broached. It means identifying and locating documents to help establish a line of questioning and lend authority to the story. It means identifying different kinds of sources, from the "rabbis," who point the way but rarely are quoted to "wise men," who can offer a big picture overview of the landscape; and from authorities who can give the official version of things to what Blundell calls the "street-level" people who live the story and among whom the reporter likely will find a central character.

In this class, students will begin with a discussion of the steps needed to background a story well and then apply those steps to the individual stories they have begun researching. Among the issues that will be discussed are: Where to look for authoritative sources and digital or print documents, how to distinguish between different kinds of sources, and how to use background material to establish a line of questioning, identify potential sources and narrow the story's focus.

READING/ASSIGNMENT:

1. Blundell, Chapter 2 (with special attention to page 27 to 29) and Stepp, pages 46 to 51. Also read Blundell story on page 114-119. Students should write a brief memo that explains whether they:

Agree with Blundell's assessment of the theme of the story as expressed on page 116

Find that the story stays tightly focused on the thematic Blundell describes. In each case, students should explain why the agree or disagree.

2. Continue background work on first feature.

Week 3: Honing the story's approach

Class 1: Focus or theme statements
Nearly every effective and interesting story is built around a single, dominant theme, using varied types of material to develop it. Writers who fill stories with exhaustive documentation but fail to establish a clear storyline file copy that reads like a government report. Writers who cobble together a series of colorful scenes that are not connected by a clear story spine run the risk of confusing readers to the point at which they will turn away.

The best features engross or entertain readers as they inform them. They offer content, structure and style, or, as Carl Sessions Stepp writes, "typically ... share the following three virtues: 1. storyline: a special idea 2. Surprise: compelling material and 3. Stylishness: engaging writing.

To arrive at 2 and 3, the writer must first establish 1, the storyline. "A limited tale well told has more impact and persuasiveness than a sweeping story that can't be adequately illustrated," Blundell writes.

It is difficult to write that limited tale, however, unless the reporter sets out on a course to report it. That usually means narrowing and sharpening the story's concept to the point at which the writer can express it in a clear and specific theme or focus statement. (For example, on page 116, Blundell gives this theme statement for the profile he deconstructs in the same chapter: "My theme statement for this story was simple - the life and work of a real cowboy in an age of cowboy hype.")

Most serious storytellers would agree with Blundell that writing such a theme sentence must precede the bulk of reporting. This does not suggest the journalist embarks on his reporting with a bias. It suggests he is reporting with purpose. If the reporter finds a better story along the way, he can recast the theme statement. But entering the reporting process without one is like running through brambles instead of along a clearly marked path. The reporter who chooses the brambles may still get to the end, but only with multiple nicks and cuts.

As students sharpen their stories' themes, they should consider some of the questions Blundell raises in Chapter 4 (assigned earlier). They also might ask themselves these questions, among others:

Is the story's scope too broad?

Do I have time to report and write a story of the scale I'm proposing?

Am I getting down to street level in my reporting?

Can I establish an element of suspense or anticipation at the outset of the story that isn't answered until near the end?

Does something happen in the story? Does something change? (Action often informs character and stories are easier to construct if they arrive at a resolution. In his excellent book on narrative nonfiction, Writing for Story, author Jon Franklin notes that the best stories are built around sympathetic characters forced to confront and resolve a conflict or complication in their lives. "A story," he writes, "consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.")

Does the story's contemporary context or its past make it more interesting to tell?

To help internalize the process of writing theme statements, students can be asked to select an article from the Journalist's Resource web site, to deconstruct it and to craft a single theme sentence that captures its purpose. They then should compare their efforts, either in small groups or a discussion of the entire class.

DUE: Memo

Class 2: Pitching the story
Students will read their theme or focus statements aloud in class. These will be critiqued by the instructor and class. Using the memos submitted by students, the instructor should work with them to sharpen the focus of their stories and troubleshoot the direction of their reporting.

Reading: Blundell, page 95 (four stages), 126 to 140 and 148 to 152; Zinsser, pages 55 to 58; Stepp, 99 to 101 and 149 to 153.

ASSIGNMENT:

1. The first draft of the 1,500-word public affairs feature article described above will be assigned for the second class of Week 5 (in two weeks).

2. Those students with a weak focus statement will be expected to recast them for the following class.

3. Students should come prepared to discuss which lead in Appendix 2 of Blundell's book they consider most effective and why. They also should consider which ending they consider most effective and why.

Week 4: Organizing stories

Class 1: Leads and endings
Journalism textbooks love to categorize lead types. Among the feature leads they'll list are anecdotal leads, short vignettes that exemplify or show what the main point of the story will tell; scene setters, that paint a picture and create a mood of a place central to a story's central theme; zingers, short, sharp leads that pull readers in with a quick turn of phrase or sharp contrast; and narrative leads, which foreshadow what's to come and build suspense without giving away the story's ending.

Categories aside, though, every lead serves the same purpose and has the same mission:
To engage readers immediately and to do so well enough to keep them reading.

Reporters, particularly those writing for newspapers or web sites, don't have the time or space to luxuriate in the scenes they create. They cannot afford to waste space or words. They must, in the words of E.B. White, "make every word tell." This is as true in writing features as in writing news. The forms and style change. The mission remains the same.

In his book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser puts it like this: "The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

He notes that leads must not only force the reader to keep reading but that to do so, each sentence must do "real work." It needs to build on the sentence before, to introduce information even as it entices or draws the reader in.

Leads must do something else: They must be honest. A lead about a shark surfacing a few feet from a swimmer off Cape Cod likely would draw the reader to the next sentence. But if the story had nothing to do with sharks other than they were swimming in the waters near a controversial site where offshore windmills will soon be built, the lead would be deceptive and tangential to the story. A lead must fit the story - in its content, its tone and its direction. Readers will resent the writer who deceives.

The second most important sentence in a good feature is its last. It should leave the reader with a sense of finality or resolution, a strong image, a reminder of the story's main theme. The best endings both surprise and resonate. This is not the long windup of the college English essay. Students are urged to leave out their editorial opinions and to eschew that dreadful term-paper transition: "in conclusion." Instead, the best stories stop, sometimes abruptly, often before the reader is quite ready.

When an opening anecdote or scene introduces a broader theme, the writer often circles back or bookends the story to where it began. Stories that return to where they began offer a sense of symmetry, a sense of completion. Other stories end by looking ahead, to the future. Or, in the case of narrative, they reach the solution readers have been seeking since they were enticed into the story in the opening scene.

The best way to learn to write different kinds of leads and endings is to (a) read many writers and take note of their approaches and (b) to try multiple leads and endings to the same story.

In this session, the class should discuss Blundell's four stages on page 95. The first. "tease me, you devil" is the anecdotal or scene-setter lead of the conventional public affairs feature and, perhaps, the first chapter of the pure narrative. The second stage, "tell me what you're up to" is the nut graph, the paragraph or two in traditional features that resolves the anecdote before it by telling what it showed and then, by placing it in broader context. The second stage is a theme or focus statement with a bit more muscle on the bone. The third stage, "I'm from Missouri. You'll have to prove what you just said," is the story's middle, its evidence and its story development, often woven together. And the last, "I'll buy it. Help me remember," is the ending.

In addition to critiquing the leads and endings in Blundell's Appendix B, the class, time permitting, might either evaluate how well one piece meets these four stages and/or recast the lead for one of the stories, a means of matching their wits against a master and also, perhaps, proving to themselves that no story has a single right lead.

Reading: Blundell, Chapter 5; Stepp, pages 141 to 149, 182 to 192; 52 to 54

Class 2: Managing the middle
Good organization can't rectify weak content. That's why students should start this class by playing close heed to Blundell's "rule of threes" (page 54), a means of layering strong reporting into story. The author notes that readers need repetition to understand ideas and concepts. But, he adds, that repetition should take different forms. So, for example, if a sentence says the catch of Gulf oystermen has been cut by a third since the BP oil spill, the next sentence should give a specific example, perhaps showing the diminished haul of the story's main character on a specific day. The third sentence might be a salty quote from that main character on how bad things have become.

Fact, followed by example, followed by quote: That is one application of the rule of threes. Working in tandem, these different kinds of story "proofs" build knowledge and entertain the reader. The rule of threes also can apply to multiple examples from different places. If, for example, new research shows a rise in foreclosures in more states, the reporter might give examples from three of them.

Regardless of their structure, stories work well when like ideas are kept together. Those ideas might be related material, as in the rule of threes, or related themes. A feature about preparations to enforce Arizona's harsh new immigration law would have one section that looks at the efforts of those interested in enforcing the law and another that examines efforts of opponents to block that enforcement. It would not whipsaw back and forth from one group to the other.

Since we all live by the clock - 24 hours a day, seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, and so forth - writing often works well if at some point it returns to the beginning and progresses to the end. The story, in other words, is organized chronologically. When explanatory passages or sections are needed, writers can step back from this chronological framework by alternating expository "chapters" with the personal narrative ones.

In class, students should analyze Blundell's story about the loss of farmland in Chapter 5 (it begins on page 103), reviewing not only its structure but the content he musters. Does he apply the rule of threes? In what ways? Does he keep like ideas together? In what way? Contrast this story to the story that begins on page 114. This story relies heavily on chronology for its structure.

Reading: Review Blundell, Chapter 4; Read Stepp, page 72 to 76, 138 to 139

Assignment: Students should come prepared to discuss the following:

William Blundell writes: "The story is happening on streets where there are no PR men strewing palms in the reporter's path, no computers disgorging blocks of seductive statistics, and a lot of people who have nothing to gain from doing pirouettes for the press. This territory can be tough on strangers, but we have to go there to gather details and direct experiences that show the reader what we're talking about."Students should discuss what he means by this. Blundell further suggests that a good half of reporting can be spent seeking the right person to talk to at that street level. Students should discuss how close to that street level they've gotten in their reporting and what else they might do to close the gap.

Students also should consider whether and how they've used Blundell's method of planning and execution to inform their reporting and come prepared to discuss this. Has it helped them? Confused them? Have they applied it or ignored it? Why?

Each student should weigh:

What gaps remain in reporting his or her story.

Whether the reporting has unearthed sound, research-based data at the story's foundation.

Whether or not the data is recent.

Whether sources interviewed carry authority.

Whether they show a range and balance.

Whether they take the story to street level.

Week 5: Working through the reporting process

Class 1: Reporting at ground level
This class will be run like a newsroom in which the instructor, as editor, coaches students through the latter stages of their reporting process. Students should be challenged to defend their initial theme statement. Does it still stand up? Should it be tweaked in any way? They should be pressed on what data they've gathered to support that premise. And they should be asked to explain and, if necessary, defend their choice and breadth of sources.

Reading: Stepp, pages 85-88

Assignment: Each student should craft a two- to three-page memo containing the following:

1. An updated theme or focus statement

2. A list of primary points that support that focus, tied, if possible, to Blundell's six question areas on pages 70-75.

3. A structural design for the story. With the Wall Street Journalmodel, it might look like this:

A lead that shows (or, as Blundell says, teases)

A nut graph (or graphs) that establishes the story and summarizes its main point.

A contextual section that places the story into a broader perspective and reinforces its main point

Sections or chapters built around like ideas

Anecdote or scenes interspersed as examples. These support the ideas and reintroduce the main character.

A closing section that circles back to the main character.

4. An example to support each primary story point.

5. A summary of research-based evidence that supports the story's main thesis.

6. An assessment of what reporting gaps remain and how they might be filled.

Class 2: Outlining the story
Students, working in teams of two, should read each other their revised theme statements (and consult the instructor on an as-needed basis). Teammates should listen as readers and coach as editors. Each should ask his or her teammate to talk through the story. What did he/she find most interesting? What alternative leads has he/she attempted? What gaps does the story have?

After finishing the critiques, each student should:

1. Read through notes and mark key facts, key quotes and key examples

2. Fast-draft a rough lead through the nut graph

3. Identify contextual material that would enhance the story

4. Order key points/facts that should be in the story

5. Identify interior scenes that belong in the story

6. Highlight any information that needs to be verified or double-checked.

In organizing key points, students should remember to keep like ideas together. They should seek examples that support all general statements. Some long-form feature writers work with a master chronology that sets all facts and scenes in a timeline of when they took place. This helps with fact checking and with chronological organization.

Reading: Blundell, Chapter 7; Stepp, 51-57 and 176-192

Week 6: The roots of good writing

Class 1: Using language with style and precision
This class will review the elements of good journalistic writing, from active, right-branching sentences to specificity and simplicity of language. Among the issues instructors might touch on and model are:

1. The cadence, pace and rhythm of good writing. It should become second nature for students to read their work aloud.

2. Selective detail and its use. (Using Journalist's Resource or news web sites, students might look for examples of selective detail that are enhanced by features and examples that detract because they don't reinforce storyline.)

3. Specificity versus generality. How does Blundell's rule of threes ensure specificity?

4. The use of analogy in translation and definition. (The value of comparing the unfamiliar to what we know.)

5. The importance of consistency of tone, person, tense and style.

After the discussion, students should draft either a lead anecdote or an interior scene from their stories. Some of these will be critiqued in class.

DUE: First draft of 1,500-word backgrounder or impact feature. Selected stories will be due the night before class so they can be distributed to the entire class in advance.

Class 2: Workshopping first drafts
Selected students should read their stories aloud, discuss obstacles they faced in drafting them, explain how they tried to overcome these obstacles, and identify what they liked best about their stories and what they lacked confidence in. Classmates then will weigh in with their critiques.

Reading: pages 76 and 77 (Blundell's profile outline) and these stories in his book: pages 44 to 47 and 242 to 248 (personal profiles), 248 to 254 (institutional profile) and 114 to 119 (occupational profile).

Assignment: Students weigh the differences between a profile, a depth interview with a subject and story about their background. What does Blundell mean when he says that profiles, like other stories, need a clear theme? Students also should try to determine some of the ways that Blundell's outline on page 76 and 77 helped define the structure of his own work.

Week 7: The profile (personal and institutional)

Class 1: Finding a subject, finding a theme, finding out information
Few aspects of journalism are more interesting and challenging than to write about someone else, - to capture what motivates that individual, what makes that person "tick." Profiles can be written as well about organizations and about what makes them distinctive or unusual. Good profiles demand backgrounding, patience, legwork, independent engagement and curiosity.

First, however, the reporter has to answer the questions, "Whom should I profile and why?" Sometimes those answers can be found in the news: Who has surfaced as an interesting figure? Sometimes the answers can be found in something interesting that a subject does, or doesn't do (note the profiles in Blundell's book of the Disney corporation, still living in the shadow of its deceased founder.) Or the answers can be found by looking for someone who exemplifies a larger group or population in the news, a veteran with PTSD, for example. Whomever or whatever the subject, writers don't merely want to catalogue that individual's or company's accomplishments. Corporate biographies and resumes serve that purpose. Profiles dig beneath the surface, capture the subject complete with quirks and blemishes. They help readers understand what makes someone "tick" and what lies behind that person's passions.

As with other features, backgrounding plays a central role in establishing the profile's theme. Backgrounding can help the reporter identify how a subject has changed and uncover inherent contradictions between the subject's words and actions. It allows the writer to separate what has been written about someone from what hasn't. And it can open doors. For example, when Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Breton of The Providence Journal interviewed two actresses co-starring in a theatrical performance, she had done "her homework." She knew that decades earlier one had understudied for the other, a fact the actresses had forgotten until reminded and one that helped Breton break the ice.

The patience to gather information in varied ways often comes into play in reporting. Profiles require multiple interviews with a subject, preferably in a setting that shows who the person is.

Profiles also benefit from the times the reporter can simply observe. Author Gay Talese, one of the most respected of a generation in the 1960s that experimented with forms of narrative nonfiction storytelling, has written and spoken about "the art of hanging out," of observing a subject and capturing the scenes that reflect that person's manner and personality.

To learn about subjects, reporters don't only interview them and read what they've written or what has been written about them. Reporters also interview others who can provide insight - family and friends, competitors and former employees, customers and patients. That's legwork. Whom they seek out depends largely on what the story's focus is. A profile of a Las Vegas card shark might lead to the subject's high school or college math teacher, his mother and his competitors around the table. It likely wouldn't call for an interview with his former piano teacher or swim coach.

To win a subject's trust, reporters must show sincere interest in that individual. At the same time, the reporter has to maintain his or her independence. Good profiles reveal some aspect of a subject's life. They are neither intended to promote nor diminish, simply show the subject as he or she really is.

Finally, reporters must be curious enough to delve beneath the surface. Most people have a public persona and a more private one. The profile writer wants to tap into both.

During this class, students will critique the profiles published in Blundell's book and the elements of framing, reporting and writing interesting, informative profiles.

Assignment: In teams of three or four, students should research their professor, then draft a tentative focus or theme statement for a profile. It might focus on the professor's research, a hobby or passion, his or her teaching style, some recent notable achievement (a book, for example) or something else. Teams should prepare to interview the professor "for story" during the next class, developing whatever themes their focus statements outline.

Class 2: Carrying out and critiquing an interview with the professor
A member of each team should read that team's theme statement and other members should explain how the team decided on its focus. After all teams have finished, students will vote on which story offers the most promise. (Team members cannot vote for their own idea.) When the vote and subsequent discussion are finished, the winning team will interview the professor. Certain rules apply.

Questions cannot be read.

Team members should listen closely to the answer and try to build on each question in their subsequent question.

Students on the other teams, meanwhile, should observe, take notes, and evaluate the content and quality of their classmates' interview. (They might consider, for example, how well each questioner engages, whether they are asking "open-ended" or "close-ended" questions, whether they are probing for emotion and insight as well as fact, and whether they appeared to be listening and taking cues for follow-up.)

After the interview and discussion about its effectiveness, the class should reflect on what steps would be needed to finish the profile.

Assignment: During the second class of next week, students will be expected to propose a profile subject and submit a theme or focus statement that identifies their approach. They should contact the subjects before preparing their pitches. They should also thoroughly background their subjects and identify at least two other people whom they can interview to develop the story further.

Reading: Article, "The Power of Listening," Scanlan, Poynter Institute; "Rules to Interview By," Rubinkowski, Poynter; Zinsser, pages 100 to 116; Stepp, 68 to 72; "Frank Sinatra has a Cold," a Gay Talese profile, published in Esquire and available in full online. Finally, students should read Anna Quindlen's essay from The New York Times "Hers" column on April 10, 1986. It begins with the words, "For most of my adult life, I have been a emotional hit-and-run driver, that is, a reporter." The essay is an excellent starting point for a discussion of the ethics of depth reporting and interviewing.

Week 8: Interviewing for story

Class 1: Logistical and ethical considerations in interviewing for story
Successful interviews start with strong preparation and curiosity. Reporters who know next to nothing about their subject, who seem bored or hurried, who work off a set list of questions instead of listening to answers, who seek facts rather than knowledge or understanding, will leave with little.

Jacqui Banaszynski, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and now a Knight professor at the University of Missouri, says at times the most effective question can be a sympathetic nod or an interjection, such as "really." This keeps the subject talking. Granted. It is not wise to start an interview this way. But often reporters are so intent on their questions that they don't hear the answers and don't encourage subjects to say more, to elaborate.

The first step in interviewing for story is to choose the right setting, a place that shows something about the subject and a place in which the subject feels comfortable. Then, says Banaszynski, the reporter's job is to "peel back the layers of the onion," to get to the story behind the story, to engage the real subject not the public persona. This takes time, patience, lots of directed yet open-ended questions, and genuine interest in what the subject has to say. Bored reporters conduct boring interviews.

It's no small matter for a green reporter to park the jitters before knocking on the door. Several things help:

Know as much as possible about the subject beforehand.

Prepare questions in advance, but never read them. Preparation helps the reporter think through the interview's purpose. Their questions shouldn't be obvious - or left sitting on the table.

Ask permission to tape as well as take notes. It can ease the anxiety of keeping up. But do take notes, listening for details and quotes and hints that bear follow-up.

Ease in with questions that relax the subject and establish rapport. The props of setting can help. Ask why the subject has chosen a particular meeting place. Comment on pictures on the wall.

Listen. The reporter's job is not to ask brilliant questions but to get brilliant answers.

This class discussion should focus on the techniques and pitfalls of interviewing for story. It is a skill that requires instinct and humanity as well as thoughtful preparation. (Banaszynski describes it as a dance in which the reporter must lead, but the interview subject gets to choose the music.)

At times reporters don't get the opportunity to interview a profile's central character. Such was the case in Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Students should discuss how Talese compensated for this.

This session should end with a discussion of Quindlen's essay. What are the ethical dilemmas raised by interviewing for story and emotion as well as for information? What are the ethical responsibilities of the reporter in setting out on a project that will involve considerable revelation on the part of the subject (for example, a profile of a family caring for an Alzheimer's patient)?

Assignment: Students should prepare a memo for pitching their profiles, which should be roughly 1,500 words in length. The memo should include:

A theme or focus statement

Key background information about the subject.

Key contacts and contact information for the subject and other people the student will interview to gain insight.

A few reflective paragraphs considering the story's approach in the context of Blundell's story development criteria on pages 76 and 77.

Class 2: Pitching profile ideas
Students will read their theme statements aloud and explain why they've proposed specific profile approaches. Students and instructor should react to each theme statement and offer constructive criticism. Those students lacking clear themes will be expected to recast their theme statements for the following class.

Week 9: The writer's voice

Class 1: How voice emerges
Inexperienced writers frequently make the mistake of approaching "voice" as something that can be superimposed. They overwrite, laboring to create something that neither sounds like them nor reflects their style. In On Writing Well, Zinsser cautions that his students seem determined to "create an act of literature," only relaxing paragraphs into a story to emerge as themselves.

Students should rest assured. For the writer who reads widely and writes frequently, voice emerges naturally over time. It is not a construct of big words and fancy phrases, nor is it an affected effort to sound carefree and breezy. It is not a celebration of the writer's opinion. It comes from within, something akin to a slightly more polished version of the writer's spoken voice.

Writes Stepp: "Voice probably comes more naturally than most writers believe. Many writers describe the struggle to 'find' their voice, but most writers' voices will emerge spontaneously if they just clear away some of the obstructing professional underbrush: the artificial constraints, expectations, and hobgoblins that haunt many newsrooms, writing studios, and writer-editor collaborations. Writers who are steeped in good material, relaxed and enthusiastic about their assignment, comfortable in their surroundings, and encouraged to be original and inventive do not have to find a voice It rings out intuitively."

In this class, students should discuss what concerns they have about voice and how they believe they should and have gone about developing it. They should then take a scene or section of their revised first features and write through it as they might tell a friend. The class should listen to a few of these and critique them.

Class 2: Workshopping the revised first feature
The instructor should identify two or three students who will be asked in advance to distribute their work to the class. They should read their stories aloud in class, be given the opportunity to discuss what worked for them and where they struggled. Then classmates should weigh in with a discussion of these stories, starting with what they liked best and then making suggestions for improvement.

Week 10: Working through the reporting process

Class 1: Sharpening the story's angle and content
Both classes in this week largely replicate the critiquing and outlining goals set in Week 5, with the instructor acting as coach to shepherd students through the latter stages of their reporting process.

Students should be asked whether their initial focus holds up; what facts, examples, quotes and scenes they have to support it; who they've interviewed (in addition to their profile subject) and what these individuals have to add. Much class time will be spent troubleshooting obstacles to reporting.

ASSIGNMENT:

Each student should craft a two- to three-page memo containing the following:

An updated theme or focus statement

A brief summary of key details, anecdotes and examples that give support to the theme.

A structural design for the story (at some point within most profiles, the writer moves chronologically through at least a portion of the subject's life)

A summary of key insights into the subject provided by other sources.

An assessment of what reporting gaps remain and how they might be filled.

Class 2: Building an outline
Week 11: Workshop profile drafts

The instructor should keep a list throughout the semester of which students have read their work in front of the class. All students should have their work subjected to class-wide critique before any individual is given a second opportunity.

Class 1: Workshop profile drafts
Assignment: Bring a local newspaper and The New York Times to the next class.

Class 2: Finding stories off the news
Reporters need to be nimble. The best, it is said, can "speed" as well as "bleed." The feature writer often does not have the luxury to report and write depth public affairs stories. She's given a day to find, report and write a story, not a week or two. This places even more weight on the challenge of conceiving something interesting and narrowing its scope. Writing stories on deadline can be a high-wire act. The reporter must gather fact and push for scene, show patience and interest in interview subjects yet race the clock, write and revise, but on the same afternoon.

Next week, the class will be expected to pitch and then write a feature off the news in the two to three days between classes. This class is designed to help students identify stories off the news.

Asking a number of questions of the news can help:

Who is left out?

Who is affected? How?

What's behind the news? (An 85-year-old becomes a citizen or graduates. Why?)

How does the past inform the story? (The calendar and unusual anniversaries suggest stories daily.)

What led up to the news?

What's the reaction to the news? (Blundell's moves and counter-moves.)

Who is the person behind the newsmaker?

How can the reporter localize a national or international event?

Do a number of similar actions - beaches closed for a high bacteria count - constitute a trend?

Can the reporter show this, or other developments, by taking readers to a place?

In teams, reporters should scour the day's paper, drawing up and prioritizing a list of possible features that might be turned quickly. The class will critique and respond to each team's ideas.

Assignment: Background and write theme statements for two stories off the news. Students will be assigned one during the next class to turn in 48 hours.

Week 12: Pouring it on

Class 1: Pitching the feature off the news
In this class, the instructor should coach students toward features they can reasonably report and write in a day or two. This discussion should reinforce the importance of ingenuity and scope in turning features fast.

Class 2: Workshop features off the news
This class should begin with a discussion of the challenges of turning features fast. As time permits, students should workshop these efforts.

Week 13: Finding a niche

Previous week | Next week | Back to top

Class 1: Researching publications, framing queries
The topsy-turvy pace of technological changes makes this an extraordinary time to start a career in journalism. In some ways, it has never been easier to be published: Register for a blog at WordPress or Blogspot and write. It's that easy. In other ways, it's rarely been harder to get noticed and paid. Students interested in doing serious journalism should pursue a few parallel paths. Even in college, they can begin building their "brand," a word that still makes older journalists shudder (their job was to cover the news, not market themselves or be the news). Students can build brand by building a website, preferably one named after them. This should be linked to blogs, a Facebook account, Twitter accounts, a resume and examples of their writing that they hope someone significant in the world will visit and read.

If today's journalism students should act aggressively in asserting a voice and marketing their work, they also should be smart and circumspect about what they post. Too many horror stories circulate today about students denied jobs because of ill-advised party pictures posted on social media accounts. As a rule of thumb, students should sleep on anything they are tempted to post in the glow of the moment.

Marketing freelance work has been streamlined in the digital age. Most newspapers and some magazines today prefer emailed query letters pitching an article to letters sent by post.

Again, however, speed can kill rather than enhance. Sizable percentages of pitches never make it past the first gatekeeper (often an intern) for a variety of reasons:

A misspelled name

A letter sent to the wrong editor

A letter sent to the right editor at the wrong publication

Grammatical errors

Spelling errors

Ill-conceived or boastful ideas

Efforts to negotiate price before a piece is sold

Offers to write for free

Once again in journalism, the query begins with research. Reporters need to research not only stories and story ideas but which publications serve an audience that would read them. They can learn a great deal about publications, their freelance guidelines and their freelance rates in the library's most recent edition of Writer's Market or by subscribing online to WritersMarket.com.

As a rule, query letters should be a single page long. At their best, they show a writer's talent and sell a clearly conceived and substantive story that fits the publication's style and audience.

The query's first paragraph tries to hook the reader very much like the first sentence of a feature does. This, however, is not the place for elegant anecdotes. It is best to settle for a quick turn lead, one that grabs the reader's attention. The second paragraph pitches the story's particulars. How long is the piece the writer is proposing? How will it develop? What's its purpose? The third paragraph introduces the writer and answers the question "why me - why this writer?" This is where writers talk about special qualities - expertise, access to the subject, experience. The final or closing paragraph makes clear that the writer will follow up.

The entire letter should be businesslike. Pleading or begging editors for a chance does not work. One more tip: Always call the publication before sending a query to check whether an editor still works there, what the editor's title is, and how to spell his or her name.

In addition to discussing queries, instructors should consider inviting in a local newspaper or magazine editor to talk about the queries they've received, which queries they liked and which ones they discarded immediately. Such visits give students a chance to network, a significant aspect of building a niche.

Assignment: Students should research a publication to which they will pitch one of their articles from the semester. They should come to the next class knowing the appropriate editor's name and title, the submission guidelines of the publication, and the nature of the articles it publishes.

Class 2: Writing and revising the query
Students will spend this class crafting and revising query letters for one of their stories from the semester. In most cases, these should be ready to email to the publication by the end of class.

Exam week: Revised profiles are due
Tags: training
Last updated: January 22, 2010

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Feature writing: Crafting research-based stories with characters, development and a structural arc - Journalist's Resource

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The best journalism engages as it informs. When articles or scripts succeed at this, they often are cast as what is known as features or contain elements of a story. This course will teach students how to write compelling feature articles, substantive non-fiction stories that look to a corner of the news and illuminate it, often in human terms. Like news, features are built from facts.

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In 2010's "Introduction to Documentary," film educator and documentary consultant Bill Nichols distilled the types of documentaries down to six styles.

In this article, we will discuss the six styles or modes Nichols wrote able. However, lets first define what a documentary actually is before we get into the types of documentaries.

What is a documentary?

Webster defines documentary as "a movie or television program that tells the facts about actual people and events." The conventional thinking about documentaries is that they document reality. Also, conventional thinking suggests they represent the objective truth and do not include fictional elements.

Certainly, these are some of the qualities we expect from journalistically driven current affairs docs made for TV where the editorial impetus is to strive for factual and balanced presentations.

But the documentary form has been shifting its shape ever since the earliest days of cinema. The Scottish documentary trailblazer John Grierson first coined the term documentary in 1926. He defined it as "A creative treatment of actuality." Commenting on Robert Flaherty's early anthropological films (Nanook of the North 1922; Moana 1926), which were more docufiction than documentation, Grierson anticipated that documentary is as much about making art as it is about presenting facts.

If you're an emerging doc maker, you should be watching as many documentaries as you can. Study documentaries of all styles and genres to inspire your own work as non-fiction storyteller. Also, read up on what film scholars and movie critics have to say about how these films are constructed.

The six primary types of documentaries

The Expository Mode

The expository mode is the most familiar of the six types of documentaries. Expository docs are heavily researched and are sometimes referred to as essay films because they aim to educate and explain things - events, issues, ways of life, worlds and exotic settings we know little about. Typical production elements include interviews, illustrative visuals, some actuality, perhaps some graphics and photos and a 'voice of God' narration track. Scripted narration connects the story elements and often unpacks a thesis or an argument.

Expository docs are heavily researched and are sometimes referred to as essay films because they aim to educate and explain things - events, issues, ways of life, worlds and exotic settings we know little about.

The "Why We Fight" (1942-43) series of propaganda films were commissioned by the government. Their purpose were to explain U.S. involvement in World War II. They were made in classic expository style. Other examples include current affairs docs made for "60 Minutes," History Channel programs, and nature films such as "The Blue Planet." The sweeping historical documentaries of Ken Burns ("Mark Twain," 2001; "The Dust Bowl," 2012) fall into the expository category.

The "Why We Fight" (1942-43) propaganda series of the World War II era follows the expository mode of documentary, most notably in its voice of God narration.

Suggested Viewing

"The Plow That Broke the Plains" Pare Lorentz 1936; "City of Gold" NFB 1949; "The Civil War" Ken Burns 1990;

The Observational Mode

Observational documentary is probably the most analyzed mode of all the types of documentaries. The form is also referred to as cinema verité, direct cinema or fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Observational docs strive for cinematic realism. The gritty realism produced by actuality filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s was achieved through technological advances made ten years earlier. Faster lenses for shooting in low light conditions and smaller cameras that could now be handheld. So, they were no longer tethered to a sound recorder with an audio sync cable. An unobtrusive crew of two could shoot almost anywhere with available light and follow actuality as it unfolded. Up until then, bulky film production gear required finicky technical setups and careful staging of the action.

Frederick Wiseman: the master of observational cinema

Boston director Frederick Wiseman, considered to be the master of observational cinema, is known for his groundbreaking studies of institutions and big social issues ("High School," 1968; "Public Housing," 1997). Wiseman resists categorization of his work: "Cinema verité is just a pompous French word."

In Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary "High School," fly-on-the-wall observational style filmmaking offers a candid peek inside a Philadelphia public high school.

In Wiseman's films, carefully edited and arranged actuality scenes speak for themselves. There is no intervention by the filmmaker, no interview questions, no commentary to camera, no narration. Also, on location, Wiseman records the sound and handles the microphone. Freed from looking through the viewfinder, the director is able to pay better attention to what's going on around him and anticipate the action. Wiseman communicates with his cameraperson through pre-arranged hand signals and directs by pointing his microphone at what he wants filmed.

"Fly-on-the-wall is the most demeaning [term]," Wiseman tells POV magazine. "None of the flies I know are conscious." Although not fond of fancy film terms, the curmudgeonly octogenarian is considered to be the most authentic maker of observational documentaries.

Suggested Viewing

"Primary Drew Associates" 1960; "Don't Look Back" D.A. Pennebaker, 1967; "Salesmen" Albert and David Maysles, 1969

The Participatory Mode

In "Introduction to Documentary," Bill Nichols describes participatory documentary as "[when] the encounter between filmmaker and subject is recorded and the filmmaker actively engages with the situation they are documenting."

The participatory mode aims for immediacy. Also, it often presents the filmmaker's point of view.

Michael Moore's documentaries are primarily vehicles for his social commentary. A dynamic shooting style that captures 'man in the street' interviews as well as ambush grillings of the powerful, staged sequences featuring the director and mostly one-sided narration are trademarks of Moore's point of view docs, including "Sicko" - slamming the health care system - and "Bowling for Columbine" - lobbying for gun control.

In "Tales of the Grim Sleeper," Broomfield again becomes part of the story as he investigates the LA serial killer.

Also, the investigative work of filmmaker Nick Bloomfield also falls into the participatory mode ("Kurt and Courtney," 1998; "Tales of the Grim Sleeper," 2014). Bloomfield shoots with a skeletal crew handling audio mixer and boom mic himself. He often rolls camera on the way to the next location and gives anticipatory commentary to camera when he's not conducting gun and run interviews.

Initially taking an investigative approach to the controversy surrounding Kurt Cobain's death, "Kurt & Courtney" falls into the participatory mode as the filmmaker, Nick Broomfield, becomes more involved in the story.

Suggested Viewing

"Chronicle of a Summer" Jean Rouche 1960; "Sherman's March" Ross McElwee 1986; "Supersize Me" Morgan Spurlock 2004; "Approaching the Elephant" Amanda Wilder 2014

The Reflexive Mode

Documentaries made in reflexive mode provoke audiences to "question the authenticity of documentary in general," writes Bill Nichols. Reflexive docs challenge assumptions and expectations about the form itself.

Dziga Vertov, the Russian film pioneer makes it clear in "The Man With A Movie Camera" that what the audience is watching is not reality but rather a construction of reality. The film is silent and contains no interstitial titles. Ostensibly a 'city documentary' that chronicles a day in the life of a metropolis, the 1929 avant-garde classic includes scenes of the film's cameraman and how he went about getting his shots. Also intercut with scenes of factories, trains and crowded streets are short sequences of a diligent film editor working with individual frames from the film. By clever juxtaposition of scenes and images, Vertov gives us a sense that the film we are watching is being assembled right before our eyes.

Rob Reiner's "This is Spinal Tap," a 'mockumentary' about a fictional heavy metal band in decline. That mockumentary also falls into the reflexive mode. Fake interviews, fake concert clips, improvised dialogue and a 'shaky cam' shooting style are Reiner's devices for taking satirical pokes both at heavy metal culture and at rock documentary conventions. Additionally, in Reiner's well-observed 1985 cult classic, audiences recognize the trademarks of the 'rockumentary' genre - intra-band conflict, decline in popularity, the band clawing their way back to the top and the final concert.

The mocumentary "This is Spinal Tap" is an example of the reflexive mode of documentary filmmaking, calling attention to the tropes and motifs common to the rockumentary genre.

Suggested Viewing

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" Banksy 2010; "The Spaghetti Story" BBC 1957

The Poetic Mode

Webster defines poetry as "literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm."

You can apply this definition almost perfectly to many documentaries created in the poetic mode. The aim is to create an impression or a mood rather than argue a point. The poetic form also referred to as abstract or avant-garde can be traced back to the popular City Symphony film movement of the 1920s. Such classics as Walter Ruttmann's "Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis" (1927) came from that period.

Also, filmmakers operating in the poetic mode typically emphasize cinematic values over content to create visual poetry. Shot design, composition and rhythm achieved in editing are hallmarks of the genre. The narrative, if there is one, is expressed visually rather than rhetorically. Additionally, Dutch filmmaker Joris Iven's City Symphony classic "Rain" (1929) is a shining example of the poetic style. It shows how a rainstorm transforms the Dutch metropolis Amsterdam.

Suggested Viewing

"Play of Light: Black, White, Grey" Laslo Moholy-Nagy 1930; "N.Y.,N.Y." Francis Thomson 1957; "Sans Soleil" (Sunless) Chris Marker 1983; "Koyaanisqatsi" Godfrey Reggio 1982

The Performative Mode

The performative mode of documentary is the direct opposite of the observational mode. In Observational documentaries, unobtrusive observation of the subject is the director's aim. A Performative documentary emphasizes the filmmaker's own involvement with the subject.

Furthermore, the filmmaker shows a larger political or historical reality through the window of her own experience. Rather than rely on the expository approach, the performative filmmaker becomes a personal guide. The guide shows it and tells it like it is with raw emotion.

In performative mode the filmmaker gives a "what's it like to be there" perspective on a world, a culture or an event in history. Without that perspective, it's likely the audience would otherwise never know those topics. In "Tongues Untied" (1989) the late African-American filmmaker Marlon Riggs combines actuality, re-enactments and his personal account to shine a light on black gay American identity.

Also in the performative category are the works of so-called 'found footage' filmmakers like Hungarian Péter Forgács ("Danube Exodus," 1999). His films are created from home movies. They're recovered personal records to tell the story of ordinary people's lives that are about to be overtaken by catastrophic, historic events.

Suggested Viewing

"Night And Fog" Alain Resnais 1955; "Paris Is Burning" Jenny Livingston 1991; "Forest of Bliss" Robert Gardner 1986

Framing all type of documentaries

All the types of documentaries have their own distinguishing characteristics. However, most docs are not made exclusively in any one mode. Rather, they combine more than one style. For example, it can be argued that Michael Moore's films straddle both participatory and performative modes. Additionally, masters of direct cinema Albert and David Maysles were clearly operating in participatory as well as in observational mode. They were not afraid to include in their films off topic interactions between crew and subject.

To enrich your understanding of the types of documentaries, look for the works of documentary masters online. Also, be on the lookout for documentary fests near you. Look for where screenings that include Q & As with filmmakers. Their insights will inform your own approach to crafting non-fiction stories for the screen.
Peter Biesterfeld is a seasoned script-to-screen television. He's also a video producer and trainer with a specialty in documentary, current affairs, reality television and educational production.

Peter Biesterfeld is a non-fiction storyteller specializing in documentary, current affairs, reality television and educational production.

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In 2010's "Introduction to Documentary," film educator and documentary consultant Bill Nichols distilled the types of documentaries down to six styles. In this article, we will discuss the six styles or modes Nichols wrote able. However, lets first define what a documentary actually is before we get into the types of documentaries.

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These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010

Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.

Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards - America's only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn't read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. Thanks to Byliner, a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction, my annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I am indebted to its founder, John Tayman, for including me in an enterprise well worth checking out - and for his encouragement as I assembled this list.

It was put together before I began my current gig at The Atlantic. The pieces I've selected represent only my own judgment, and do not reflect the opinions of my colleagues, whose lists would surely be wonderful and different.

Thomas Shaw invents breakthrough medical devices. In America's hospitals they'd save lives and money. But the dysfunctional industry that supplies doctors and nurses prevents these wares from getting to the patients who need them. And health care reform hasn't changed a thing.

In the most notorious prison system in America, that rarest of things happened - a push for reform that actually worked.

Sports & Leisure

Was he the best ping pong player ever? Marty Reisman says that's how he'd be remembered if the game wouldn't have been taken over by whippersnappers with new-fangled paddles. So late in life, he began challenging some of the best in the sport with only one condition: old school equipment.

A profile of Cleveland, Ohio, told through the lens of its sports fans and their latest heartbreak.

One of the world's most accomplished chess champions reflects on how CPUs changed his game.

A generation ago, an I.B.M. computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Now the company has made a machine that plays Jeopardy. Can it win?

What hobby took over Tom Bissell's world even more than his cocaine habit? Playing Grand Theft Auto.

A five part series on a dangerous substance that's poisoning the world's cocaine supply, how to avoid it, and the human suffering caused by drug prohibition.

EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY
A Cocktail Party In The Street: An Interview With Alan Stillman by Nicola Twilley and Krista
Ninivaggi

How T.G.I. Fridays became the first singles bar in New York City and changed American happy hour culture forever.

The best surfer in the world, why he should be a bigger star, and the reasons he isn't.

Science, Religion & Human Nature

A dispatch from Hebron - a Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement in its midst.

A meditation on social pressure, and how it can be conducive to virtue as well as vice.

Is alcoholism "a physical condition with a spiritual solution," as Alcoholics Anonymous has long insisted? Dr Olivier Ameisen no longer thinks so - having successfully ended his own debilitating addiction, he thinks he's found a revolutionary cure for the disease in the form of a widely available pill.

In Amarillo, a militant Christian group is targeting the city's swingers with a campaign of constant harassment - and they say that the gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops may be next.

The subject is ants: "If you think the numbers sound like abstractions, if you wonder what deranged census-taker came to the conclusion that in the shadow of each and every human being there lives a hidden host of 1.6 million, well, that only means you haven't attempted the experiment of peacefully coexisting with them."

What America lacks is leaders who are capable of deep, original thinking.

In the United States, the norms that influence how we conceive of corruption are far different than what prevails in the Middle East - and our efforts in the region are doomed to failure until we understand that.

As scientists decode their genome, a look at the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to bringing them back from extinction.

For almost two centuries, The Order Of The Assassins "played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East," terrifying enemies through their own brand of asymmetric warfare.

A man with Lou Gehrig's disease explains why getting through it is so trying.

The Large Haldron Collider "exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless." A look at the secrets physicists hope it will unlock.

The life story of the first person ever diagnosed with autism - and the hope his long, happy life holds for the one in 110 children who suffer from the condition.

On Birth, Death, & The Afterlife

Wealthy Western couples are flocking to India, where the medical tourism industry is offering the best deal on a vital commodity: wombs.

"The author found himself utterly unprepared for one of life's near certainties--the decline of a parent." And then he discovered that he wasn't alone.

"Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions--and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left."

On an Internet message board, an anonymous figure was befriending people contemplating suicide - and pushing them to go through with it.

Inside the spooky world of America's warrior sharpshooters, "the sniper's special talents and torments," and how they cope.

The case for cutting more people open after they die, so that we can continue benefiting from a medical procedure that has taught us more about the human body than anything else.

A personal essay.

An imagined response by Mick Jagger to the recently released Keith Richards memoir. This is Slate at its best: inventive, smart, and spot on in its cultural analysis.

On the intractable problem of not knowing what you don't know.

A spot on parody.

An unparalleled ode to the oyster - and a regretful premonition of its possible demise.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the innovative grocery store chain and its uncanny ability to deliver tasty, original fare at bargain prices.

Friends. Food. And the ultimate backyard cookout.

Blue fin tuna can swim as fast as 40 miles per hour, navigate journeys thousands of miles long, and thrive anywhere from the tropics to frigid subarctic seas. Unfortunately, they may not survive long enough to be seen by your grandkids.

An Italian restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is trying to do something every other institution in that neighborhood has failed at - bringing Hasidic Jews, blacks, and white secular liberals together in one place.

The definitive ode to mayonnaise.

Profiles

That most rare of magazine features - a celebrity profile with an unfamiliar narrative.

Few interviews so adeptly force the reader to confront the fact that our complicity in the fame industry is indefensible.

In a year that saw several profiles of Andrew Breitbart this one was the standout - a look at the man behind the bombast and bullshit.

The defining portrait of America's most famous movie critic, the cancer that cost him his jaw, and the unexpected turn his career has taken after all these years.

The secretive religious organization that ministers to many of Washington DC's most powerful people.

As a 15-year-old, Omar Hammami had just been elected president of his sophomore class at an Alabama high school. A decade later, he was on the eastern edge of Africa leading a brutal Islamist insurgency. Why?

A close look at the peculiar environments where we shop.

Why the Manhattan neighborhoods you love can never last forever.

A jeremiad against Wall Street and its out-sized place in American life.

If you want your city to succeed it's not huge employers you want - it's lots of small entrepreneurs.

"In Japan, food portions are small, women's shoulders are modestly covered, and Pamela Anderson's breasts are not a certified national obsession. This makes Hooters' innuendo-heavy version of family dining an odd fit that the chain's Japan team had to coach into reality."

- In lively, exquisitely crafted prose, Will Wilkinson offered posts at Democracy In America that managed a rare trifecta: they were provocative, logically sound, and infused with razor sharp wit.

- Glenn Greenwald, Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko and Adam Serwer for their vital work on civil liberties.

- Joe Posnanski for his delightful sports blog.

This list has improved every year thanks to reader support. If you value this effort - or if you're just a lover of nonfiction - I encourage you to sign up for The Best Of Journalism newsletter. For $1.99 per month, you'll get my recommendations on what to read every week, and occasional editorial treats too. My subscribers include some of the most accomplished writers and editors in American journalism. Finally, congratulations to all the writers and editors who produced this year's winning entries.

Image credits: Reuters and Flickr users Bradley James, Doug Beckers, Tim Green, Spigoo, Jenny Downing and Epsos.de

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

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These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010 Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.

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Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
This is the eighth and last in a series of writing lessons by the author, starting with the basics and leading to more advanced techniques.
When I was a child, my father, an Army officer, was posted to South Korea. Each week, he would send us the Sunday comics, along with a cassette in which he read them out loud. He didn't want us to forget the sound of his voice.

My father was quite the raconteur. He let his voice go gravelly when reading the part of Sarge in "Beetle Bailey," and he adopted a suave register when playing Prince Valiant. He knew that good storytelling required not just a good story (or at least some decent comics), but also a good storyteller.

In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, "We're in this together."

Jason Arias

Yours, mine or ours?
One device, point of view, refers to the perspective from which a story is told. It is telegraphed by our choice of pronouns. In the first-person point of view, a writer chooses the soul-baring I or the inclusive we. (The plural we can also appear as the editorial we or the royal we.) In the second person, the writer uses you, which is capable of sliding from the informal and irreverent to the bossy imperative.

In the third person, the writer usually relies on he, she, it or they, which allows a kind of neutrality, the impartial distance of the detached observer. This is the classic point of view of journalism. The starchy one is another third-person option, and in fiction the third person yields a range of options, from the third-person omniscient, when the narrator knows what all characters are thinking, to the third-person limited, when the narrator is inside the head of one character.

Let's look at some classic Bob Dylan songs for examples of different points of view. In his 1962 cover of the bluesy standard " Corrina, Corrina," Bob Dylan tells the story of longing in the first person:

I got a bird that whistles
I got a bird that sings
But I ain' a-got Corrina
Life don't mean a thing

The 1964 protest anthem " The Times They Are A-Changin' " relies on the second person. The singer is talking to you, the listener:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown

Then, in " Hurricane," written in 1975 about the controversial murder conviction of the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Dylan uses the third person:

Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin' that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

Balladists, novelists, journalists, essayists - all must decide on a point of view for every story. Point of view affects tone, with the third person seeming more objective and hard-boiled and the first person more up close and personal. The second person can slide from directly addressing the reader - even telling us what to do (as in Dylan's case) - to a hipper, more informal form used by stylists as diverse as Jay McInerney, in " Bright Lights, Big City," and Laura Fraser, in " An Italian Affair."

Behind the byline
Voice, another aspect of great storytelling, refers to the ineffable way words work on the page. It tips us off to the identity of the writer. Reflecting a combination of diction, sentence patterns and tone, voice is the quality that helps a writer connect with a reader, and it turns the writer into a narrator.

All reviewers need to have a strong voice, since we are turning to them for an unvarnished opinion. The movie critic Pauline Kael wrote in a chatty, urgent, impassioned voice. Writing about " Last Tango in Paris," she mixed references to the playwright August Strindberg, schlockmeisters and the writer Norman Mailer, among others. Her language went from lyrical to lurid: "The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink - the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink." Sometimes she was downright plain-spoken: "This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies."

Last week we listened to the bracing voice of Winston Churchill and the pastoral eloquence of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But voice can be comical, too - try reading the wry reporting of Mary Roach: "The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken," she writes in the first line of "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," adding, "I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan."

Voice can also be eclectic and highly distinctive. Junot Díaz, for example, mixes Spanglish, literary theory, Caribbean history and no small amount of profanity in his fiction. The opening line in chapter one of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" gives you a taste of his inimitable voice: "Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about - he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock."

But voice can be understated, too. E.B. White may seem to possess the most seemingly natural, effortless voice possible, but that doesn't mean it's not carefully crafted. Here's the opening to his 1941 essay "Once More to the Lake":

One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. ... I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods.

What's magical about voice is the way we, as readers, recognize it. Anyone raised on "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little" finds comfortable familiarity in that last passage.

The sum of the parts
Writing style begins with clarity: Find the right words, and decide what to leave out. Then shape your sentences. Turn a phrase, play with sound, listen for cadence. Think about tone, and select a point of view. The more you explore, trying different ways of writing sentences, the closer you get to an understanding of how to inhabit a text and how to make it sound like you.

This is my last writing lesson, but Draft will go on to cover many different topics. My lessons have offered you some tools to write with verve, style and voice. Of course, there are things we didn't cover - how to make metaphors and avoid clichés, for example, or when to use the present tense - but the path to literary accomplishment is delightfully long and full of personal side trips. Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.
Draft welcomes submissions at draft@nytimes.com. Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of "Sin and Syntax" and the forthcoming "Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch." She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.

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Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. This is the eighth and last in a series of writing lessons by the author, starting with the basics and leading to more advanced techniques. When I was a child, my father, an Army officer, was posted to South Korea.

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Just over half of all students attending public schools in the United States are now eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, according to a new analysis of federal data.

In a report released Friday by the Southern Education Foundation, researchers found that 51 percent of children in public schools qualified for the lunches in 2013, which means that most of them come from low-income families. By comparison, 38 percent of public school students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches in 2000.

According to the report, which analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics, a majority of students in 21 states are poor. Close to two-thirds of those states are in the South, which has long had a high concentration of poor students. In Mississippi, for example, close to three-fourths of all public school students come from low-income families.

But the West also has a large and growing proportion of low-income students. Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada have high rates of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

Children who are eligible for such lunches do not necessarily live in poverty. Subsidized lunches are available to children from families that earn up to $43,568, for a family of four, which is about 185 percent of the federal poverty level.

The number of children eligible for subsidized lunches has probably increased in part because the federal Agriculture Department now allows schools with a majority of low-income students to offer free lunches to all students, regardless of whether they qualify on an individual basis or not.

Still, it is clear that public schools are educating higher numbers of low-income children, and the trend has been going on for much longer than the period that started with the most recent recession.

Steve Suitts, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, which is based in Atlanta, noted that an increasing number of low-income immigrant families were moving to regions where they had not gone before.

Students from such families tend to arrive at school with different needs from those from middle-class and affluent families. They may have more medical problems or behavioral issues and need extra academic help. Unlike their wealthier peers, they do not have the benefit of music lessons, private sports leagues, tutoring or trips to cultural events, and their schools are left to fill in the gaps.

"We in no way are providing schools and teachers in schools with what it takes to educate low-income students today, as they continue to become a huge part of the school population," Mr. Suitts said.

The Obama administration has indicated that it plans to request an additional $1 billion in 2016 for the program that funnels money to schools with high percentages of poor students.

"Now more than ever, it is critical that we as a country ensure schools have the resources and support necessary to prepare every student - no matter his or her ZIP code - for college, careers and life," said Dorie Nolt, a spokeswoman for the federal Education Department. Critics of federal education policy say that there is too narrow a focus on academic standards and testing as the way of measuring whether poorer students are getting equal opportunities. Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, suggested that policymakers look at schools in the wealthiest communities as models of what all schools should offer.

"Just tell me what you provided for those kids, that those parents said was absolutely crucial for my kids to succeed in life," Ms. Eskelsen García said. "That includes good athletics and arts departments, too, I'll bet you. So make that school the benchmark."

Recognizing the increase in low-income students in California, Gov. Jerry Brown instituted a new funding formula two years ago for state dollars directed to public schools. Now, schools get a much higher proportion of per-pupil funding for students who are from low-income families, in foster care or learning English.

School administrators in districts that already have a high proportion of poor students say they have to think of many services that educators in wealthier districts do not.

An increasing number of school districts now also serve dinner to students. In Cleveland, where the vast majority of the school district's 39,000 students are poor, Eric Gordon, chief executive of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, said that most schools there have regular programs to send food home with students and that the district has staff members who help homeless families find places to stay.

When he was a principal in a much wealthier district, Mr. Gordon said, he never had to worry about any of these issues. Now, he said, as more districts have to serve poor students, he worries there will not be enough taxpayer money to help everybody.

"The first-ring suburban communities around us are facing the impacts of poverty," Mr. Gordon said. Now federal funding "has to be spread over more communities with more poverty."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Percentage of Poor Students in Public Schools Rises. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Percentage of Poor Students in Public Schools Rises

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Just over half of all students attending public schools in the United States are now eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, according to a new analysis of federal data. In a report released Friday by the Southern Education Foundation, researchers found that 51 percent of children in public schools qualified for the lunches in 2013, which means that most of them come from low-income families.

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Don’t Pity the Student Who Is $120,000 in Debt

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Don’t Pity the Student Who Is $120,000 in Debt

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Poor students go to university voluntarily.

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The New York Times latest series on student debt begins with the story of Kelsey Griffith, who owes $120,000 in student loans. Griffith is written as someone we should pity, because of this crippling burden she must pay. Indeed, it's a sad story:

ADA, Ohio - Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

"If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also," said Ms. Griffith's mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn't seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

"As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it," said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. "I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I'm going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that."

But doesn't the blame rest squarely on Griffith's own shoulders? No one forced her to choose an extremely expensive college. No one forced her to take out the loans. Did she not bother to read what she was signing up for?

Certainly, other people deserve some blame, too. Her mother should have realized what foolishness this was. And staff members at Northern Ohio who "urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price" behaved contemptibly. But ultimately, this is a problem of Griffith's own making.

Sure, she was only 18 at the time. But if society considers her old enough to vote, drive, live by herself, and study college-level academic material, I have a hard time believing we should also consider her mentally unready to manage her finances. The truth is that students who took out massive loans to attend super-expensive colleges, rather than affordable ones, bought into a deal that was too good to be true.

But college administrators and advisers who peddle expensive programs-especially those who urge enrollment in the very fields that do not tend toward employment-are in desperate need of a reality check.
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Don't Pity the Student Who Is $120,000 in Debt | The College Fix

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The New York Times latest series on student debt begins with the story of Kelsey Griffith, who owes $120,000 in student loans. Griffith is written as someone we should pity, because of this crippling burden she must pay. Indeed, it's a sad story: ADA, Ohio - Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University.

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For more than 25 years, she has traveled throughout hundreds of cities in 47 states and four coun- tries to assist professionals with proven strategies for breaking poverty barriers.

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My education, my work, and my passion are to help people from all races who are trapped in poverty. I want them to have genuine options for lifelong success. This can only happen if the voices of those struggling with poverty can be heard and their perspectives understood. Poverty is resolvable, however, making a difference for people who live in the crisis of poverty requires a paradigm shift. A shift that moves us beyond stereotypes and judgement to a deeper understanding of the causes of poverty and its impact on human beings. With this awareness, we can work together to provide genuine opportunities for people to move out of poverty. -- Donna Beegle

Keynotes

Dr. Donna Beegle will captivate the audience with an informative, inspirational and motivational keynote presentation that is customized for your group. The Keynote will include working more effectively with students and families who live in the crisis of poverty, improving communication across poverty barriers, One woman's journey from abject poverty to a Doctorate, or targeting your conference theme.

Workshops

Dr. Donna M. Beegle provides inspirational, motivational, informative speeches customized for your Organization. Donna weaves personal experiences with research to provide insights for communicating and working more effectively across race, poverty, gender, and generational barriers.

All sessions are offered in a workshop or keynote format. Donna' s two most requested workshop sessions are "Poverty 101" and "Concrete tools for communicating more effectively." Participants can receive continuing education credits. All sessions are customized to meet your organizational goals.

The Poverty Institute is hands on two-day poverty institute for educators, health, justice, social service professionals, and community members who want to better understand poverty and to gain tools for making a difference.

Poverty Coaching Institutes prepare participants to serve as poverty coaches for their organizations. A Communication Across Barriers poverty coach is trained to conduct workshops for breaking poverty barriers and improving communication and relationships for in-house staff. Coaches serve as on-site experts for educating colleagues, providing leadership for breaking poverty barriers, and developing system wide approaches for improving outcomes for families who live in the war zone of poverty. Poverty coaches will also be trained to conduct Poverty Competency Assessments and assist their organization in developing and implementing customized action plans with measurable results.

We want a movement guided by certified trainers who have a strong foundational knowledge of poverty and its impacts on children and families and who are grounded with a solid ability to assist in creating paradigm shifts and systemic change. At the Beegle Speaker Institute, participants will gain the skills for training and coaching individuals and organizations to ensure inclusive, responsive systems to truly make a difference for those living in the crisis of poverty.

This training is intended for volunteers who work with people in poverty. It has two parts. The first part, (4 hours), is for everyone wanting to work with people in poverty and is full of information they'll need to do this. The second part (4 hours) is for people who would like to teach this curriculum to others, a "train the trainer" session. This would be idea for an organization wanting to deepen a large number of volunteers understanding, but do it in a very cost effective way. There is no better way than to have someone on site for this.

The Opportunity Community (OC) model is a national movement designed to create the types of communities we all want to live in. This can be achieved by increasing prosperity for the people living in the crisis of poverty. Dr. Donna M. Beegle combined her experience of living for 28 years in extreme migrant labor poverty, with 20 years of studying and working with communities to create a research-based model for assisting people to move out - and to stay out - of poverty.

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Welcome to Communication Across Barriers | Communication Across Barriers

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My education, my work, and my passion are to help people from all races who are trapped in poverty. I want them to have genuine options for lifelong success. This can only happen if the voices of those struggling with poverty can be heard and their perspectives understood.

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David Hulme is Professor of Development Studies at The University of Manchester where he is Executive Director of the Global Development Institute and CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. Currently, he is the president of the Development Studies Association. He has worked on rural development, poverty and poverty reduction, microfinance, the role of non-government organisations in development, environmental management, social protection and the political economy of global poverty for more than 30 years.

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David Hulme is Professor of Development Studies at The University of Manchester where he is Executive Director of the Global Development Institute and CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. Currently, he is the president of the Development Studies Association.