Infant Caregiver Project May Be Even Better Than Pre-K

It’s now common for youth to remain in foster care or residential treatment for years. For troubled or victimized children in need, assistance at home is often more effective than foster placement.

The foster care system is widely acknowledged to be 'broken', and to ignore those who age out of the system. A program in Memphis is improving the lives of at-risk youths by working to reunite them with their original families.

Child mortality rates in third-world countries are often shockingly high. But they are gradually decreasing due to efforts that target contagious diseases and more widespread health education.

Due to recent brain development research, educators are working to add more math education into pre-school and kindergarten classes. Studies show that children of this age are actually extremely receptive to numbers and learning geometry.

Preschoolers in the U.S. who misbehave are increasingly being expelled. In Connecticut, trained counselors educated teachers about how to deal with emotionally traumatized kids which reduced expulsions.

Preparing the young for elementary education is a priority to nurture reading and social skills. For 16 years, Tulsa Oklahoma has instituted a state funded preschool, staffed with teachers trained in early education. Tulsa’s Pre-K initiative has shown that their children are more prepared for literacy skills and math; however, maintaining the positive results is a long-term challenge.

Fixing the education system in the country requires addressing the problem of student motivation to endure and succeed in school. Pathways to Education is a Toronto-based program designed to keep at-risk kids in school. It offers four different kinds of support: counseling, academic, social and financial, all of which contribute to a 46 percent decrease in the student drop-out rate.

A panoply of responses to poverty has emerged to address poverty in the United States and abroad. The responses share in three key tactics: Measuring impact, paying for success, and collaboration.

The Homeless World Cup is the premier soccer tournament for homeless players. Programs around the world use soccer as a means of building a sense of community, sublimating negative energies, and encouraging personal growth.

Universal preschool is a policy that is often hard to pass on voter referendums. But, as evidenced by examples in Detroit and New York, such an investment means that more children would do well in kindergarten, fewer would need special education or other extra help and down the line, fewer would drop out of high school, end up unemployed — or in jail.