When journalists grab information from biased parties, we get bad reporting. Case in point, a Washington Post article,
"Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty" which apparently unquestioningly took "allegations" as true without looking further. WAPO reported
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.
If you go visit
The Southern Education Foundation's website ("Advancing Creative Solutions to Assure Fairness and Excellence in Education") you can find a link to the cited report, or a least a report on the report,
"A New Majority Research Bulletin: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation's Public Schools":
In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in 2013.
Most of the states with a majority of low income students are found in the South and the West. Thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of low income students in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the other 21 states were in the West.
At this point, you are invited to download the "research bulletin" itself. You really need not bother, the "bulletin" merely states what the WAPO reported,
For the first time in recent history, a majority of the schoolchildren attending the nation’s public schools come from low income families. The latest data collected from the states by the National Center for
Education Statistics (NCES), evidence that 51 percent of the students across the nation’s public schools were low income in 2013.
The pattern was spread across the nation. Half or more of the public schoolchildren in 21 states were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, a benefit available only to families living in poverty or near-poverty in 2013.1
In 19 other states, low income students constituted between 40 percent and 49 percent of the states’ public school enrollment. In other words, very high proportions of low income students were evident in four-fifths of the 50 states in 2013 ....
