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Here’s five interesting #SocInn links we’re clicking on today:

1. Huffington Post: Education Drives Expanded Access to Opportunity in the U.S. Managing Director of Opportunity Nation, Russel Krumnow, takes a look at how dramatic gains in education have propelled overall growth in access to opportunity over the past four decades, “helping to offset economic downturns such as the Great Recession. This reinforces the importance of education as one of the most powerful paths to the middle class and economic prosperity as a nation.” Opportunity Nation is an America Forward Coalition Member.
2. Wall Street Journal: Common Core Has Less Support in Poll “Public support for the Common Core educational standards is waning, according to an annual poll about public schools by Gallup and PDK International, a group for education professionals… Ellen Moir, chief executive of the New Teacher Center, a nonprofit focused on developing new teachers, said, “Teachers really want high standards for their kids. I think teachers are hungry for guidance on implementing the Common Core.” She added that communication about the issue of standards is lacking. ‘We’re not doing a very good job of educating the public,” said Ms. Moir. ‘We need to help parents understand the importance of setting standards that are ambitious, robust and help each child reach his or her full potential.'” New Profit is a proud funder of New Teacher Center.
3. The Hechinger Report: Increased child poverty rate disproportionately impacts the nation’s youngest learners The Annie E. Casey Foundation is out with its 25th KIDS COUNT Data Book, which finds that “there has been a recent uptick in the single most important factor for predicting a child’s school readiness and life outcomes generally: whether or not he or she lives in poverty. After recessions end, the child poverty rate tends to continue climbing, and current circumstances appear no different. Even with different ways to measure it and different conclusions, KIDS COUNT shows a reversal of some of the gains made earlier in the past quarter-century, with approximately 16.4 million kids officially living in poverty in 2012. The number of children in single-parent homes was up, too: 35 percent, versus 25 percent in 1990.”
4. The New York Times: Among the Poor, Women Feel Inequality More Deeply “It’s at the lowest income levels that the burden on women stands out. Not only are they more likely than men to be in a minimum-wage job, but women are also much more likely to be raising a family on their own.’Inequality is rising among women as well as men, but at the bottom, women are struggling with some dimensions of these problems that men aren’t, which is raising and supporting these families as single heads of households,’ said Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell University.”
5. MSNBC: The hunger crisis in America’s universities “Battling stigma is a challenge for food pantries of all stripes, but the struggle appears to be especially pronounced on college campuses…As low-income populations have gone to college and food insecurity has risen up to swallow the lower rungs of the middle class, hunger has spread across America’s university campuses like never before. In some places, it’s practically a pandemic: At Western Oregon University, 59% of the student body is food insecure, according to researchers from Oregon State University (OSU). A 2011 survey [PDF] of the City University of New York (CUNY) found that 39.2% of the university system’s quarter of a million undergraduates had experienced food insecurity at some time in the past year.”