NCYL Attorney Jesse Hahnel and former NCYL Law Clerk Caroline Van Zile, who just recently graduated from Yale Law School, have published The Other Achievement Gap: Court Dependent Youth and Educational Advocacy in the July 2012 issue of the Journal of Law and Education.

The article presents a path that advocates, states, and federal legislators can pursue to shape education law and policy to better serve the hundreds of thousands of youth in foster care. Social science literature chronicles three major obstacles to foster youth’s educational progress: First, foster youth experience high mobility rates and often lose class time and credits as they are shuffled from home to home and school to school. Second, foster youth suffer when the education and child welfare systems fail to effectively collaborate. Finally, since foster youth generally have no active parental figure in their lives, they are often impaired by a lack of educational advocacy.

NCYL Board President Peter Edelman had an op-ed piece in the July 29 issue of the New York Times, explaining why the US has been unable to end poverty. 

Edelman, a lifelong anti-poverty advocate, is author of the recently published So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America. The book provides an informed analysis of how this country can be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor. While we have taken important steps, reducing by millions the number of poor Americans, Edelman says, poverty fluctuates with the business cycle. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top.

So Rich, So Poor delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics, and takes a particular look at the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood.

Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1964 to 1968, he went on to fill various roles in President Bill Clinton’s administration, from which he famously resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation.

NCYL Board Treasurer James Weil, President of the Food Research and Action Center, recently published Ending Hunger in America: A Step-by-Step Approach, in SparkAction.

“In 2010, 16 million children lived in food insecure households and 22 percent of all American children lived in poverty,” Weil wrote. “These facts are unacceptable. The United States should be and can be a place where all children have the adequate and nutritious food they need to build healthy bodies and strong minds, allowing them to reach their full potential. This is a practical as well as a moral imperative—making sure children are well fed is necessary if America is to reach its health, education, economic, and fiscal goals.”