Poverty Education

In Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do About It, veteran educator and brain expert Eric Jensen takes an unflinching look at how poverty hurts children, families, and communities across the United States and demonstrates how schools can improve the academic achievement and life readiness of economically disadvantaged students.

Make the world a better place for people in need! This book is full of ideas and projects listeners can put into action to fight poverty.

Growing up, there is so much out of our control and to feel frustrated about. But in this inspiring and practical handbook, bestselling children's author and Human Rights campaigner, Onjali Raúf, shares her top ten ways for finding hope, creating change and making a difference. With the help of her favourite fictional characters and some of the most inspiring people she has ever met, Onjali invites listeners to dive in and discover everything there is to know about kindness, empathy, friendship and fighting for the things that matter.

Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces listeners to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.

Full-cast performance with comprehensive commentary and analysis for any student to fully understand and appreciate the novel. Dickens' tale of Pip, a young man "removed from his present sphere of life" and cast into a Victorian nightmare, is a powerful audio drama to be enjoyed and appreciated as an important piece of social criticism.

Born in poverty-stricken Albania, twin sisters Argita and Detina Zalli always dreamed of becoming doctors. Their parents scrimped and sacrificed, committed to giving them a better life. But then the unthinkable happened. In 1997, the government collapsed, plunging the country into anarchy and civil war. The twins' dream unraveled along with their homeland. Their parents had to find a way to leave and save their daughters' futures—not to mention their very lives.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself.

La pobreza es solo ausencia de riqueza, algo que dados los mitos económicos de la época se suele olvidar. El libro plantea que al considerar a la pobreza como un fenómeno "causado", se incurre en una explicación falsa acerca de la creación de la riqueza y sus condiciones y cómo eso sirve a un proyecto político vitimizante y frustrante.

Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the listener on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling listen for everyone who cares about America’s future, Making Americans brims with innovative ideas for educators and policy makers across the country.

Les Miserables is set in the Parisian underworld. The protagonist, Jean Valjean, is sentenced to prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. After his release, Valjean plans to rob monseigneur Myriel, a saint-like bishop, but cancels his plan. However, he forfeits his parole by committing a minor crime, and for this crime Valjean is haunted by the police inspector Javert. Valjean eventually reforms and becomes a successful businessman, benefactor, and mayor of a northern town.

Since Joshua Steckel began work at a Brooklyn public high school as its first-ever college guidance counselor, every one of the hundreds of graduates he has counseled has been accepted to college, many to top-flight schools with all expenses paid. But getting in is only one small part of the drama of his students’ stories. In a riveting work of narrative nonfiction - winner of a Studs and Ida Terkel award - Hold Fast to Dreams follows the lives of 10 of Josh’s students as they navigate the vast and obstacle-ridden landscape of college in America.

Each of us has a finite amount of mental bandwidth, the cognitive resources that are available for learning, development, work, and everything else we have to do. These "attentional resources" are not about how smart we are, but about how much of our brain power is available to us for the task at hand.

A distinctive new voice: Rex Ogle's story of starting middle school on the free lunch program is timely, heartbreaking, and true. Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle's first semester in sixth grade. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies, and Rex was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Rex's is a compelling story of a more profound hunger - that of a child for his parents' love and care.

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

America meant "freedom" to the immigrants of the early 1900s - but a freedom very different from what they expected. Cities were crowded and jobs were scare. Children had to work selling newspapers, delivering goods, and laboring sweatshops. In this touching book, Newberry Medalist Russell Freedman offers a rare glimpse of what it meant to be a young newcomer to America.

Crash tells the story of the Great Depression, from the sweeping fallout of the market collapse to the more personal stories of those caught up in the aftermath. Packed with photographs, primary documents, and firsthand accounts, Crash shines a spotlight on pivotal moments and figures across ethnic, gender, racial, social, and geographic divides, reflecting many different experiences of one of the most turbulent decades in American history.

From the perspective of the young adult he was then, Francisco Jiménez describes the challenges he faced in his efforts to continue his education. During his college years, the very family solidarity that allowed Francisco to survive as a child is tested. Not only must he leave his family behind when he goes to Santa Clara University, but while Francisco is there, his father abandons the family and returns to Mexico.

At the age of 14, Francisco Jiménez, together with his older brother Roberto and his mother, are caught by la migra. Forced to leave their home, the entire family travels all night for 20 hours by bus, arriving at the U.S. and Mexican border in Nogales, Arizona. In the months and years that follow, Francisco, his mother and father, and his seven brothers and sister not only struggle to keep their family together, but also face crushing poverty, long hours of labor, and blatant prejudice.

It's the year 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend, Arthur, must leave school and go to work on the looms in the mill. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in their town, and a few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board.