Wraparound student supports

Last year, we release an online toolkit called "Investing in the Future: Revenue Options to Give Every Child the Opportunity to Learn," which presented strategies that states can use to raise revenue to fund important investments in education, transportation and more. Now we are releasing a series of fact sheets that distill the critical takeaways from the toolkit and offer brief overviews of strategies like instituting a millionaire’s tax or closing tax loopholes for large, profitable, multi-state corporations.

Brittini Gray, a community organizer with Metropolitan Congregations United, published a powerful op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decrying the continued lack of resources for schools in the St. Louis area. She lays out how lack of funding and poor policy decisions have continually damaged the Normandy School District, creating a climate in which students have minimal opportunities to succeed.

Currently over half of students in the U.S. received free or reduced-price lunch, a statistic that is widely used as a proxy for measuring child poverty rates. Now, however, a new strategy to fight hunger in schools might make it more difficult to collect data on the number of low-income students across the country.

Education organizers in New York City celebrated when then-mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio promised to create 100 new community schools to better meet the out-of-school needs of the city's children. Now, just over a year into his term as mayor, de Blasio's administration is upping that number to 200 community schools by 2017.

The school funding case working its way through the Pennsylvania court system ran into a temporary setback when a lower court ruled that the court system lacked the jurisdiction to rule on whether the state was failing to provide adequate funding to schools and students. The defendants are filing an appeal and the case will now advance to the State Supreme Court.

As part of the ongoing Roadmap to Expanding Opportunity project, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center has released a new policy brief designed to help advocates and educators make the case for expanding access to one particular resource in school: smaller class sizes.

Jitu Brown, National Director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, and Judith Browne Dianis, Co-Director of the Advancement Project, spoke out in a recent op-ed, calling for a return to ESEA's true purpose: ensuring equity in our nation's public schools so that all children have the same opportunities to succeed.