Letter

While we did not deliberately set out to devote the Journal of Children and Poverty’s first issue of 2018 to the theme of education, a varied collection of work at the intersection of poverty and school success came to fruition at the same time. Therefore, we are pleased to be publishing three original manuscripts, a policy brief, and two book reviews from various perspectives that all examine educational challenges facing low-income children, beginning with kindergarten readiness and looking all the way through the academic rigors of high school and beyond. The first article, ‘A Structural Model of Early Indicators of School Readiness among Children of Poverty’ by Dominic F. Gullo, uses structural equation modeling to test the effects of certain direct and indirect factors – gender, approaches to learning, age at school entry, family income, and the health status of the child at birth – on low-socioeconomic status children’s readiness for school. In the second article, Rachel McKinnon, Allison Friedman-Krauss, Amanda Roy, and C. Cybele Raver start from the premise that little is known about how changing schools – something that children living in poverty tend to do often – impacts the crucial bonds between teachers and students. In ‘Teacher–Child Relationships in the Context of Poverty: The Role of Frequent School Mobility’, they use growth curve models to explore the association between frequent school moves and the quality of low-income students’ relationships with their teachers over the five years between preschool and third grade. Finally, David Rutkowski, Leslie Rutkowski, Justin Wild, and Nathan Burroughs turn the focus to older students and in ‘Poverty and Educational Achievement in the US: A LessBiased Estimate using PISA 2012 Data’ employ propensity score matching to compare educational attainment between 15-year-old American students living in poverty and their otherwise similar – yet not poor – peers. Notable deficiencies were found for the children living in poverty, who scored well below the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average on math achievement while their higher income matches were on par with their global peers. ‘A Systemic Intervention Research Agenda for Reducing Inequality in School Outcomes’, this issue’s policy brief by Kirsten Kainz, Melissa Lippold, Elaina Sabatine, and Rebecca Datus, provides an agenda for designing and evaluating systemic interventions – those designed to address complex problems through the identification and purposeful incorporation of knowledge from the multiple systems implicated in a problem – to reduce education inequality. Systemic intervention approaches have yielded positive effects in health and human services, and the authors make the case for their expansion in the education context. We also highlight two books focused on students at-risk for educational failure – ‘Why We Drop Out’: Understanding and Disrupting Student Pathways to Leaving School, by Deborah L. Feldman, Antony T. Smith, and Barbara L. Waxman (Teachers College Press; reviewed by Elizabeth (Liz) Chase) and Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students by Karen Gross (Teachers College Press; reviewed by Dawna Wilson Horton). Three other reviewed books, while not specifically focused on educational issues, indirectly engage with them: Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars by Carolyn Sufrin (University of California Press; reviewed by Monica McLemore); Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State by Catherine