Unpacking Poverty and Its Impacts on Student Success

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The current debate around poverty and schools is often not productive. At the extremes, poverty is viewed as either crippling or an excuse. One way to try and break the logjam is to unpack poverty to better understand the impact of its components on school and student success. By doing so, we can organize schools and community and family supports to lessen poverty’s impacts.

Over the next several years, we will hold a series of colloquiums on key components of poverty, and post our findings on this site.  For each component of poverty, we will examine its scale, location, magnitude, educational impacts, and what is known about effective solutions.

• Introduction to Unpacking Poverty
• Food Insecurity
• Concentrated Neighborhood Poverty
• West Baltimore: A Case Study in Unpacking Poverty
• Housing Quality, Instability, Mobility, and Homelessness
• Crime and Violence
• Students’ Mental and Emotional Health
• Housing Quality, Instability, Mobility, Homelessness and Their Impacts on Students and Schools

Presenter: Robert Balfanz, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Co-Director, Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS)

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