Archive for Socioeconomic Factors

Educators in Michigan are finding themselves battling the effects of poverty and the state's faltering economy. As is often the case with social injustice, the youngest citizens suffer the most.

Half of all schoolchildren in Muskegon County qualify for free or reduced lunches—more than 40% of them getting lunches for free. In 2004, the last year for which a number is available, 9,782 children in the county were living in poverty—a 34% increase since 2000, according to the Kids Count in Michigan 2007 Data Book.

For many children in poverty, their biggest safety net is their school. It is there where they find stability, regular nutritious meals, warm surroundings and caring teachers. Read more in The Muskegon Chronicle online.

Facing the prospect of a not-to-distant shortage of teachers, the Blaine County School District in central Idaho and the county’s nonprofit education foundation are taking innovative measures to lure educators to the Wood River Valley. The Blaine County Education Foundation announced earlier this month that it has awarded its first “forgivable loans” to help two Wood River High School teachers meet the stiff local price for down payments on homes, a solution that underscores the stumbling block in drawing educators to the valley—exorbitant real estate prices.

Solutions are not something the school district can ignore, as the county’s Hispanic student population continues to mushroom and half the district’s teachers reach retirement age within the next 10 years. Read more in The Idaho Mountain Express and Guide online.

The Liberian government has been advised to strive to provide free education or a minimum cost education as a means of reducing poverty in the country. A Liberian national, Gester E. Murray advised that this will help promote national security, peace, and development.

Murray, Assistant Minister of Land and Mine and Energy, made the disclosure Tuesday at the Monrovia City Hall. Speaking on the theme, “Statement on Educational Enlightenment,” Murray said education provides a road map to survive in a competing world of depleting resources.

He noted that the higher a country's illiteracy rate, the more its power base is emasculated, and the more vulnerable it becomes to the predator-prey relationship. If Liberia is to survive in the current global system of increasing competitiveness and rapid development, he advised that pragmatic and robust actions must be taken to increase the country’s literacy mainly through expanded educational funding. Read more on Murray’s speech at allAfrica.com.

A court ruling that California parents “do not have a constitutional right” to home-school their children has touched off anger and bewilderment throughout America’s home-schooling community and prompted a denunciation from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. A state appellate court decision last month could force some 166,000 home-schooled students in California to enroll in conventional schools. Governor Schwarzenegger said Friday he would go to the legislature if the ruling is not overturned.

The number of students nationwide who are home-schooled is not known because 10 states are so hands-off they require no reporting at all, nor do parents always comply with reporting requirements. Estimates range from 1.1 million to 2.5 million home-schooled students, and the numbers are rising. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

 The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing. But how much is really the school’s fault?

A new study by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT—concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools and using just those four variables, were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy. Learn what those variables are by reading the article in The New York Times.

A South African recruitment drive for teachers, combined with an exodus of education professionals escaping Zimbabwe’s seven–year recession, is creating staff shortages so severe that some schools are closing. At least four schools have closed and several more are facing the same situation. Teacher salaries have not kept pace with Zimbabwe’s official inflation rate of more than 6,000%, while neighboring South Africa has embarked on a recruitment drive for teachers to bolster their own teacher numbers. The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) said this week that 15,200 teachers had migrated to nearby states since the beginning of 2007. Read about the teacher shortage at IRIN News.

Some three million primary and secondary school students in West Africa will begin school up to a month later this year, while others hold their first days of classes in warehouses, because of unprecedented flooding in the region. After torrential rains, in many areas classrooms are still filled with displaced families and roads and bridges are washed out, prompting the governments of Togo and Mali to postpone the start of school. Officials also are concerned that the flooding could have a longer–term impact on children’s education. “Families have lost everything and their economic vulnerability could justify not putting their children in school,” said Minister of Social Affairs and Promotion of Women Memounatou Ibrahima. Read the article at IRIN News.

Class sizes in primary schools in the United Kingdom (UK) are still far higher than in most other developed countries despite millions of pounds of government cash being pumped into the sector, an international study revealed yesterday. Figures show the UK—with an average of 25.8 pupils per class in state schools—comes 23rd out of 30 Western countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD) for class sizes. Only Korea, Chile, Japan, Turkey, Israel, Brazil and Ireland have larger class sizes. The smallest primary school classes are in the Russian Federation, where there is an average of just 15.6 pupils per class. Read the article at The Independent website.

With only 19% of children in school after Sierra Leone’s decade–long civil war, the former government began an ambitious project to renovate and build more schools. But while brightly painted blue and white classrooms have already popped up in towns and villages around the country they come at a time when fewer teachers than before are willing to work in them. “Graduates from teacher training colleges are abandoning the classroom looking for greener pastures elsewhere,” deputy director of junior and secondary schools at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Simon Labour, told IRIN. Before the war, Sierra Leone had about 20,000 qualified teachers, Labour said, but that number has dropped to 15,000. Read the article at IRIN News.

Thousands of school children have been forced to stay at home as schools remain closed because of flooding in eastern Uganda. More than 150 educational institutions failed to open at the beginning of the new term today (September 17) after the floods washed away roads, homes, buildings and crops in the region. Education minister, Namirember Bitamazire, told reporters the Ugandan government was trying to find alternative strategies to allow the schools to reopen, especially in the districts of Amuria, Katakwi, Manafwa and Bukedea. The floods have affected tens of thousands of people. Many of those are families that had just returned to their villages after years of displacement in camps because of civil war between the government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Read the article at IRIN News.

When it comes to the racial achievement gap, principals or teachers can have a bigger impact on achievement in one year than whether a child is poor or from a single-parent home, according to a study by a Carnegie Mellon University professor. The study looked at 89 principals, 236 English teachers and 199 math teachers of students taking the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in reading and math in March 2005. The study found that 62 principals had an effect on math results—ranging from scores 17.5 percent higher to those 37.2 percent lower. And 33 principals had an effect on reading—ranging from scores 15.66 percent higher to 35.65 percent lower. Among teachers, 148 had a significant impact in math scores and 90 did so in reading, both also by a wide range, positive and negative. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

When it comes to reading, race can matter. A young black male has a better chance of getting teased for reading books instead of playing sports. Black children are less likely to have parents who read to them at an early age and expose them to books. By 12th grade, black students are scoring significantly lower in reading than white students, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. Add to that the fact that 12th grade boys overall score lower than 12th grade girls. That puts the average black male high school senior at the bottom of all reading groups. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Russian tycoons are the target readers for a diamond–encrusted book with an estimated value of £3 million. British entrepreneur Roger Shashoua is offering a made–to–order edition of his new book Dancing With The Bear. The cover of each of the special “oligarch” copies, said to be the most expensive book in the world, features more than 600 flawless diamonds. The book is an account of how the author made £100 million through business in post–Soviet Russia. “I am just happy that conspicuous displays of consumption can now be associated with writing, rather than fashion accessories.” Read about it and see a picture of the book at BBC News.

For 10–year–old Yasmin and her eight–year–old brother Rabbi, nothing will keep them from their studies—not even this year’s worse than average monsoon rains. Each day they make the perilous 20–minute journey to their newly relocated school in Holan, a bustling community of 2,000 inhabitants northeast of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. “I’ve never missed a day,” Yasmin said. But many of her classmates at the Holan government primary school are not so lucky. “There has been a 20 percent drop in attendance,”said Nasir Uddin, one of four teachers at the school. According to the government’s latest estimates, over 10 million people were affected and 447 were killed as of August 20. And while Bangladesh, a flood–prone nation of over 150 million inhabitants, emerges from some of the worst flooding in recent years, its impact on the country’s primary school sector has yet to be fully assessed. Read more at IRIN News.

Whether they are poor or rich, white students are scoring higher than their African American and Latino classmates on California’s standardized tests, results released Wednesday show. And in some cases, the poorest white students are doing better than Latino and black students who come from middle class or wealthy families. This year’s test scores show that the difference in academic achievement between ethnic groups is more than an issue of poverty vs. wealth. Read more of this article from The Sacremento Bee.

  Since 2002, Congress has provided about $16 billion under the No Child Left Behind law to help states and school systems improve the caliber of the teaching workforce, the biggest federal investment ever in teacher quality. But some education experts argue that funding across the country has been frittered away on programs that are not specially tailored to closing achievement gaps between rich and poor students or ensuring that teachers are prepared to help students meet ever-tightening academic standards. Read more about this debate in this article from The Washington Post.

More than 20 years later, educational attainment is higher and felony arrests are lower for the alumni of a Chicago early intervention program for low-income children. The enrollees, now in their late 20s, are also more likely to have health insurance, according to a follow-up study released this week. Chicago’s Child-Parent Center program was—and is—more intense than Head Start, the main federal assistance program for low-income children and their families. Read more about the study in this article from The Kansas City Star.

Should cash be used to spur children to do better on reading and math tests? New York City’s Department of Education is implementing a pilot program that will reward fourth and seventh graders with $100 to $500, depending on how well they perform on 10 tests in the next year. Read more about the program in this article from The New York Times.

Summer can be the enemy of the schoolteacher: Students forget their math. They stop reading. And in the case of those with limited English skills, they lose their newly acquired words. So at 22 elementary schools in the poorest enclaves of Montgomery County, Maryland, summer ended early. The program, called Extended Learning Opportunities—Summer Adventures in Learning, is considered a national model for stemming the summer brain drain. Students who faithfully attended the first summer session in 2002 tested better in reading and math after summer school than before, according to research. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

It’s been a truism for decades that students’ learning slips during the summer, and that low-income children fall farther behind than their classmates, but no one had connected the longitudinal data dots to show just what the cumulative consequences of the summer slide might be. Until now. A recent study by sociology professor Karl L. Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore concludes that two-thirds of the reading achievement gap between 9th graders of low and high socioeconomic standing in Baltimore public schools can be traced to what they learned—or failed to learn—over their childhood summers. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Most Canadians, but especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, experience “significant” literacy loss as adults, a Statistics Canada report shows. The decline in skills begins at age 25, bottoms out around 40 and then tapers off around 55 years old. For example, adults aged 40 scored an average of 288 on a standardized literacy test in 1994, but in a second survey nine years later, that had dropped to 275—a loss of reading ability equal to half a year of schooling. Read more of this article from The Daily News of Halifax.

Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study. Read more about the study, by the FPG Child Development Institute and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in this article from the Medical News Today website.

We seem to be doing a bit better educating our most disadvantaged students. But many educators think that is not enough. The numbers displayed in the graphic smorgasbord known as "The Condition of Education 2007," from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, reveal the struggles of a generation to make schools work for all children. Read the article by Jay Matthews on rating gains in our schools at The Washington Post website.

Canadians have slightly better learning conditions, but still do poorly in acquiring knowledge after their formal schooling ends, according to a new report. The Canadian Council on Learning released a composite learning index May 29 that calculated the country's learning score at 76, modestly higher than last year's benchmark of 73. The composite learning index, now in its second year, measures communities' performances on 24 weighted factors related to lifelong learning, ranging from youth literacy and university attainment to workplace training and volunteering. Read the article at globeandmail.com.

The Preuss School UCSD, located on the campus of the Univesity of California-San Diego, is the only public school in America that admits only the children of low-income parents who have not graduated from college and requires all of those students to take several Advanced Placement courses before they can get their diplomas. In its latest list of America’s Best High Schools, Newsweek ranks Preuss No. 9. Columnist Jay Mathews looks at the factors that make this school a success in this article from The Washington Post.

Portland Public Schools students, especially low-income ones, are spending more time with their heads buried in books, learning to read in kindergarten, deciphering math and cramming in still more with evening homework. Zeroing in on the basics has paid off: Low-income elementary students are doing better than ever. Who could argue with what it takes to make that happen? Parents, that’s who. Read more about the complaints that middle-income parents are making in this article from The Oregonian.

Across Ontario, Canada, parents are raising more than half a billion dollars a year for their children's schools, with $245 million of that raised in Greater Toronto alone. In the first-ever look at how much money ends up in public schools through fundraising and fees, boards reported a total of $567,040,304 for the 2005-2006 school year, says the annual report from the advocacy group People for Education, to be released today. That's more than 3% of the province's education budget. People for Education spokesperson Annie Kidder warned that it is creating a two-tiered system. A small number of schools are raising most of the money, according to the report. "Communities that can raise huge amounts of money will have more of what's needed to make an excellent public school," Kidder said. Read this article in The Toronto Star online and another on the same topic at globeandmail.com

 The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) requires school districts that receive federal funding for low–income students and that have not met state performance goals for three consecutive years to offer supplemental educational services (SES), such as tutoring. In its report issued April 18, the Government Accountability Office included recommendations that the U.S. Department of Education clarify what and how services are offered, how states are to monitor such services and whether they affect student achievement. The report also discussed the challenges of keeping parents informed and the contracting and coordination of service delivery. To read the full report, click here. To read a summary, click here.

Chronic reading problems and depression appear to be related, especially among low-income children, and the reading problems precede the depression. A new study done by researchers at the University of Delaware and West Chester University of Pennsylvania found that low-income children who take part in reading assistance programs in fifth grade are more depressed, anxious, and withdrawn than their peers, especially when they have chronic reading problems. Read more about this research in this article posted on the firstscience.com website.

Music classes, art, gym and nature studies will get a $35 million boost to give children a more well–rounded education, announced Education Minister Kathleen Wynne yesterday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in downtown Toronto. The new grant is part of a $781 million hike in funding Wynne unveiled for Ontario schools, which also includes $10 million to help aboriginal students and $10.5 million for 177 schools that are small or very remote. Wynne said she was not handing out financial goodies to prepare for October’s provincial election. “Students in Grade 1 and 2 don’t know that there is an election coming and they really don’t care. What they care about is that their teacher has the resources that she needs and that their school has good, clean classrooms.” Read the article at TheStar.com.

On the north bank of the Clyde, rows of grey, crumbling low-rise flats represent a part of Scotland scarred by poverty: West Dunbartonshire. In 1997, 28 per cent of children who graduated from West Dunbartonshire’s primary schools were functionally illiterate, and further studies confirmed that they were likely to leave secondary school in the same state. At that time, Tommy MacKay, a local child psychologist, set West Dunbartonshire a goal that many believed unachievable: to eradicate illiteracy by 2007. Over the past 10 years the region has individually assessed 60,000 pupils. In 2006, West Dunbartonshire recorded 96 per cent literacy, and is on track to achieve 100 per cent by the end of this school year. Read how this was accomplished in this article from The Independent.

An attempt to find out how many children in England are being educated at home suggests the number might range between 7,400 and 34,400. But the study, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, concludes there is no accurate picture of the extent of home educating. And it says the rules governing home education are “too vague.” Parents cited bullying and inadequate local schools as among the reasons for teaching their children themselves. Read more at the BBC News website.

More than half of Maori boys in New Zealand leave school without even level one of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), a leading researcher says. Russell Bishop of Waikato University said February 12 the statistics were depressing and represented a future “time bomb” of problems. Despite a multi–million dollar investment to lift Maori education performance, 2005 statistics show 53% of Maori boys left school with no qualifications compared to 20% of Pakeha boys. Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, while Pakeha are any non–Maori people including descendants of the early English and Northern European settlers. Read the article at stuff.com.nz

Twelve years after the collapse of apartheid and its segregated school system — which created white schools with top-class facilities but left black schools chronically underfunded — classrooms are as unequal as ever. Find details in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa).

Amid a political debate over illegal immigration that is reminiscent of the one in the United States, teachers’ collectives across France have been staging protests and helping shelter families facing deportation. One educator in the Education Without Borders Network, said teachers such as he find it “intolerable” that children they have taught for years could be “brutally ripped from their studies” and sent back to poor and sometimes dangerous countries. Get details in Education Week.

A new study from the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that when scores are adjusted for race, income, and a variety of other factors, the gap in results narrows between public and private schools as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The narrowing was especially noticeable for fourth-grade reading. The results are controversial, and even the authors warned against a too-broad interpretation of them.

Books open up a world of imagination for children on reserves and can lift them from a life of poverty and despair. Even the death of a young woman couldn’t keep youngsters from their summer literacy program. Find details in the Toronto Star.

An article describes how the Migrant Education Program supports migrant children's learning over the summer, providing continuity to help them raise their literacy skills while following their parents from one community to another.

Toronto teens born in the Caribbean, Central or South America, and east Africa are twice as likely to drop out of school as their peers from China, Korea, and Japan, new research shows. The first study to track Toronto high school students through Ontario’s new four-year curriculum also shows that students who speak Spanish, Portuguese, or Somali are at higher risk than kids who speak any other of the city’s most common languages. They are also more likely to fail grade 9 math and flunk the grade 10 literacy test, and are less likely to apply to college or university. Find details at the Toronto Star.

About 30% of US public school students fail to graduate on time, according to an analysis funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that appears in today’s issue of Education Week. The analysis found that during the 2002–03 school year, students in largely minority districts and urban districts had lower graduation rates than their largely white and suburban counterparts. Official state-reported graduation rates for the same year were almost always higher than the report’s conclusions, primarily due to states’ varied methods of calculating dropout rates. A summary of the report may be found at the Stateline.org website.

A Sydney-based think tank has found that bilingual teaching is one reason why many Indigenous children are underachieving. The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) report finds that Indigenous students are taught English as a second language, and at a later stage than their urban counterparts. The report also says inflexible state and territory government policies are restricting students’ progress. Get details at the Australian Broadcasting System website.

Like the United States and many other countries around the world, New Zealand has been stymied for decades by achievement gaps between students of different ancestry. In New Zealand’s case, concern centers on students who are Maori. Maori students make up nearly half of all schoolchildren in a nation of 4 million. Yet, compared with their peers of European heritage, most of whom are of British descent, Maori students drop out of school, fail courses, and rack up suspensions at disproportionate rates. Read more in Education Week.

Another study says younger people read less than previous generations did, with implications for the publishing industry.

“The State of America’s Children,” an annual publication of the Children’s Defense Fund, takes a close look at 37 million people living in America who are poor (including 13 million children) and the growing numbers of families struggling to survive. The 2005 edition includes most recent (September 2005) U.S. poverty data. Chapter Four of the report, which can be downloaded for free, contains analysis of pressing education issues (including NCLB, school funding, high-stakes testing, and zero tolerance policies).

A former teacher with a message on educating children from poor backgrounds is influencing school leaders anxious to close the achievement gap. Her story appears in Education Week.

China’s unique “children’s palaces” — community centers of sport, recreation, and learning, and a fixture of most big cities since the 1950s — are disappearing, falling prey to shrinking government budgets and rising pressure on civic organizations to turn a profit. Learn more at the China.org website.

Public school teachers in the wealthiest US communities continue to be more qualified than those in the poorest despite a federal law designed to provide all children equal educational opportunity, according to preliminary data released by the Department of Education. Find details in USA Today.

Fifth graders in the United States have made academic progress over their first six years of learning, but gaps in their learning still exist, concludes the fifth in a series of reports from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. According to the study, released by the National Center for Education Statistics, poverty level and a mother’s level of education were among the strongest factors to have an impact on fifth graders’ achievement. View a copy of the report on the NCES website.

As the student representative to the school board in Baltimore County, Md., Gabrielle Wyatt made it her job to talk with students about what motivates them or holds them back when it comes to academics and planning for college. What she heard has given her a different perspective on the nature and causes of the “learning gap.” Find this story in the The Christian Science Monitor.

Countries differ in the extent to which they value fairness and equity, but more than most countries Finland seems to consider equality of accomplishment as no less important than equality of opportunity. A recent OECD report outlines the steps the nation has taken to ensure educational equity. View a copy of the report at the OECD website.

English needs to be adequately taught to Aboriginal students to break the cycle of academic failure, chronic absenteeism, and low retention rates, according to a report to be released today by Fiona Stanley’s Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. Researchers say the findings are powerful evidence for a major overhaul of Aboriginal education and a shift in policy. Read more of this story in The Australian.

For decades, China set a good example for developing countries, offering largely free education. The literacy rate soared to 91 percent for those over age 15, comparable to rates in developed countries. But by the early 1980s, as the country veered from state control to free markets, the cost of educating their children fell increasingly on families. For many, especially in the countryside, compulsory schooling became a commodity they could no longer afford. Read about the ongoing “historic reform” in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The effort to improve educational opportunities for the women of Burkina Faso required a lot more groundwork than anyone expected. It has also borne unexpected fruit. Learn about the effects on one society of bringing literacy to its most marginalized members: visit the UNESCO Literacy Portal.

The largest survey of reading ever carried out in Irish primary schools showed pupils whose parents were poor, unemployed, or had limited education, tended to obtain below-average scores on reading tests. Learn more in the Irish Examiner.

Access to a home computer increases the likelihood that children will graduate from high school, but blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have a computer at home than are whites, according to a new study conducted at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The study also found that the so-called “digital divide” is even more pronounced among children than adults. Learn more at eSchool News.

A new study outlines the characteristics of high-impact high schools, which help disadvantaged young people reach nearer their full potential by, among other things, adhering to a "culture of high expectations" and maintaining "an absolutely unwavering commitment" to closing the
achievement gap.

Reading for pleasure among children is a middle-class pursuit, according to research issued on the eve of the publication of a major report on the future of literacy teaching in schools. Read about this National Literacy Trust report in The Guardian (UK).

Reach Out and Read, a national program that aims to get books into the hands of children in low-income areas, has begun work in the Camden, New Jersey, USA area.

A full century after it revoked its imperial civil examination system, China finds itself at a crossroads of education system reform. The great divide in wealth, standard of living, and opportunity that exists between urban and rural populations in China has been reflected in a national school system with two very different faces. Read more in China Daily.

Children in Great Britain know from the age of 11 whether they want to go to college or university, according to new research. Ask 11-year-olds what they plan to do when they finish compulsory education at the age of 16 and the majority will predict correctly whether they stay or leave, the University of Reading found. Read more about the study’s findings in The Guardian (UK).

This brief article in UNESCO’s Education Today Newsletter compares the effectiveness of two national school-readiness efforts — the U.S. Head Start program and England’s Sure Start — in equipping children from the poorest communities to succeed in school.

New research from Britain’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) shows that middle-class children have been the chief beneficiaries of billions of pounds of public investment. Although average test scores for all groups of 11-year-olds have risen, the gap between children from deprived backgrounds and those from more affluent families has actually widened in the past six years. Read more about the study in The Times Online (UK).

The gap between the number of boys and girls going to school around the world is narrowing, but it would still take a “quantum leap” to reach an internationally agreed target to get every primary-aged child into school by 2015, according to a UNICEF report released yesterday. This story is reported in the The Guardian (U.K.).

The length of time California’s ESL students have spent in the United States seems less significant than their native language and their socioeconomic status, according to a study released by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Hard to identify, obscured within another struggling yet more prominent demographic—impoverished Latinos—migrant students face the same obstacles as other low-income minority children. But migrants must also learn to navigate a world that is constantly in motion, and with each interruption to their schooling, they risk falling farther behind. An article in The Christian Science Monitor examines the special problems faced by this “invisible minority” in the age of No Child Left Behind.