ABSTRACT
Poverty takes an enormous physical, emotional, and economic toll on families, neighborhoods, and communities and therefore on children and schools. Denying the significance of poverty in schooling in the face of decades of research, testimony, and common sense requires profound naïveté or a frightening level of willed ignorance. However, with a realistic agenda for educational reform grounded in a commitment to the educational well-being of all children, and a sincere pursuit of the historic social ideal of equal educational opportunity, poverty could matter far less. Such a pursuit would necessarily be part of a larger agenda of social reform to reduce poverty and the growing disparities between rich and poor and between the politically powerful and powerless.
