New Report Highlights Role of Nonprofits in Overcoming Educational Effects of Poverty

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- A report to be released next week as part of the Grad Nation Summit in Washington, DC, highlights the unique role that nonprofit groups, community volunteers, and full-time national service members can play in the efforts to overcome the challenges placed on students as a result of poverty. The report, sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies and authored by Dr. Bob Balfanz, co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, argues that in order to overcome the educational impacts of poverty, high-need schools must provide direct, evidence-based supports for students.

The full report, "Overcoming the Poverty Challenge to Enable College and Career Readiness for All," can be found here.

"Poverty can propel students to attend school less often, struggle behaviorally, and to put forth diminished effort. In short, it interferes with students' ability to attend, behave and try," the report concludes. "In order to successfully confront the poverty challenge, we need to rethink our approach to student supports. To move towards high impact, cost-effective student support strategies, we need to adopt an evidence-based framework for providing student supports and wisely deploying the increased capacity of nonprofit organizations that leverage community volunteers and national service members to provide the human capital and expertise needed to implement and scale evidence-based student supports in schools that serve high-poverty populations."

The report makes the case for the strategic deployment of community volunteers and full-time national service members to provide evidence-based student supports. Organizations such as the Minnesota Reading Corps, the Nashville K-2 Reading Program, Experience Corps, and GenerationOn are specifically designed to leverage citizen volunteers able to support struggling students periodically for a set period of time.