But attempts to bring in any sort of choice for poor parents have failed.
These would enable poor parents to choose their children's schools (including, controversially, private and religious schools) thus promoting competition to attract pupils.
If money is advertised for participation in trials as it often is if the research is being done by a private company poor parents may expose their children to risks they would not otherwise take.
In the most radical break with the party establishment so far, John Norquist, the mayor of Milwaukee, has thrown his weight behind a scheme that allows poor parents to send their children to private schools (see box).
" That story of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?
WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Madeleine Sackler: Storming the School Barricades
As part of the government's emphasis on work, the working families tax credit, to be introduced in October, and the children's tax credit, due in 2001, will help poor working parents.
That makes sense because previous work has shown that skinny female zebra finches are less likely to survive and reproduce than skinny males so when resources are poor, parents should prefer to produce sons.
His parents were poor, and he helped to support them from a young age.
Parents in poor zones will be given the option of sending their children to schools in wealthier districts.
ECONOMIST: Has Wake County thrown out the baby with the bathwater?
Outsiders' money can distort the decisions of officials and parents in poor countries.
His family was poor, but his parents, Sarah and Andrew Parks, instilled in him the values of hard work and racial pride.
But he was such a poor student that his parents sent him to a strict boarding school, where the students were assigned cadet drills.
Parents in poor areas were offered the choice of transferring their children to wealthier schools, but capacity limits made many such requests impossible to grant.
ECONOMIST: Has Wake County thrown out the baby with the bathwater?
For those from poor families, whose parents had few academic achievements, who got into private school via the assisted-places scheme, the benefits were especially marked.
And research shows that when the incomes of poor families rise, parents spend the gains on improving the diets of their children through buying fresh fruit.
BBC: Poorer children more likely to be obese, says Anna Soubry
"For a poor family where the parents are suffering from addiction, giving them an extra pound in benefits might officially move them over the poverty line, " he will say.
Ocalan, 49, said late last year he had little sense of national identity until he was a teenager, but was struck by the powerlessness of his poor, illiterate farming parents.
Working fast, Vallas moved on to the toughest part of his job -- making public schools accountable for their results rather than blaming poor test scores on parents or society.
Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.
WSJ: Arthur Brooks: Republicans and Their Faulty Moral Arithmetic
Today, the sad reality is that if you're born poor, if your parents didn't go to college, if you don't know your father, if English isn't spoken at home then the odds are stacked against you.
The idea of charges for university education (euphemistically known as top-up fees) strikes fear into the hearts of parents neither poor enough to benefit from state hand-outs nor rich enough not to feel the pinch of high tuition fees.
ECONOMIST: The battle-lines over university fees have been drawn
And what about targeting children whose parents are too poor, too feckless or too drugged to give them a decent upbringing?
If a child is enslaved, it's because his parents are desperately poor.
British children brought up in two-parent families where only one parent works are almost three times more likely to be poor than children with two parents at work.
Household accidents were also disproportionately more likely to affect the poor with children with unemployed parents 37 times more likely to die in a fire than children in professional families.
Some parents pointed to poor design and use of substandard building materials as some of the reasons why many schools -- described as "bean-curd dregs buildings" -- collapsed in areas where other buildings were not badly affected.
Some parents pointed to poor design and use of substandard building materials as some of the reasons why many schools - described as "beancurd dregs buildings" - collapsed in areas where other buildings were not badly affected.
"Unfortunately, these parents and these poor children, these innocent ones, will now be in a country where there are no laws, there is no redress, and that has been a refuge for fugitives and wanted criminals for many years, " Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R- Florida, told CNN.
应用推荐