low income students

Please be cautious about applying statistical averages to particular cases. While on *average* low-income students don’t do as well as higher-income, any one *particular* student may be bright or even gifted.
Classifying students by income is prejudicial. My daughter suffered badly from this when I was an adult student until I became very obnoxious to the school board. Beware the self-fulfilling negative prophecy.

check out the works of Ruby Payne for an understanding of children of poverty and how to best reach and teach them.

You might look up the research on Head Start. However, I do agree with Victoria. Young poor kids start with the same drive to learn that kids from regular backgrounds have. Some of blame for the failure to reach them has to lie with low expectations. Of course they don’t come in with quite the same “tool kids” However, time after time when people have gone in with ideas to reach them (think Mavis Beacon, etc.) these kids have done really well. Head Start has proven pretty reliably that early intervention is the answer (aside from something like eliminating poverty!!)

—des

If this is an assignment, might I suggest going to http://www.eduref.org and searching educational databases (or, perhaps, your school library has access to some, which are often accessible from computers on campus or off-campus with passwords).
Of course, the fact that students from low income families are statistically more likely to go to schools with fewer resources and teachers with less experience & expertise might just have something to do with the causes behind the correlations too.