The report seems to suggest that poverty is the main reason for the problems, but surely that's not the only reason? Or even the main reason? Surely it's the whole environment that counts, irrespective of financial security, like parental love, caring household, cross generational respect, even extended family nurturing? It's so hard to create a soundbite to sum up a human condition.
Poverty has negative effects on literally all of the things you just named here's a more in-depth article on the subject of poverty concerning education reform http://hubski.com/pub?id=56397
But am I right in thinking you're looking at this from a strictly US viewpoint? Most of the world's population live in what we would call poverty, and yet they don't suffer the same sort of social angst as do those on the lower rungs in the West? The Federal Poverty level is something like $15K a year for a 2 member household in the US, the global poverty level is if a person earns less than 2 dollars a day (which is relative of course). But I would suggest that, for example, just because more than half of the Bolivian population live in 'poverty' they don't necessarily suffer from despair, misery and hopelessness, they try and enhance their lives as any community does, and enjoy what they can. I believe we're seriously missing the point if we equate all aspects of quality of life to how much money or material assets someone has. But maybe I'm just being fanciful?
That poverty is bad is kind of a tautological statement. Poverty is like a gradient, and at one end of the gradient it becomes difficult to live well, which is bad. There is no real specific hard line income level at which one is suddenly in poverty, despite attempts to define such a hard line. Poverty is location dependent and is not simply a measure of income. The same level of income that is inadequate for someone living in Manhattan could be just enough for someone living in Oklahoma and yet feel extremely rich for someone in Bolivia. Some people may be able to compensate for poverty depending on their social context, but poverty's effect on social context is undeniably negative. Specifically in the context of the first world, our cost of living is high, and most adults in the first world don't have the social or physical resources to be independent of wage labor, creating a cycle which feeds back on itself as people spend less time on social labor and more time on wage labor, thus further reducing the social resources available to those around them. Whichever way one attempts to defeat society's ills, it's undeniable that a significant hurdle to success is presented by poverty, and many problems are even caused directly by poverty. Attempts to ignore poverty have failed, so we should address it directly.