Purpose: The purpose of the symposium is to confront the reality that to overcome achievement gaps and promote academic proficiency for all children, we must tackle the full range of opportunity gaps faced by children from backgrounds of concentrated poverty, including health-, home-, and community-related barriers to learning, as well as inequities in academic opportunities. To meet the economic challenges of an increasingly “flat world,” to head off the disintegration of our polity by preparing all students to be capable civic participants in our democracy, to eliminate achievement gaps and fulfill the moral imperative of ensuring that a child’s racial, socioeconomic, or family background no longer predicts that child’s educational attainment, our nation must adopt a comprehensive, whole-child approach to educational equity and provide meaningful educational opportunities for all.