online magazine article: Testing and Poverty

"Stephen Krashen Pulls the Rug Out From Under the Standards Movement"
By Anthony Cody on April 3, 2012 1:33 PM
Some Comments on Paul Farhi's "Flunking the Test"
        Guest post by Stephen Krashen.

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Krashen continues to hammer at poverty as the issue in "failing" academics in the United States. 

While American students' scores on international tests are not as bad 

as critics say they are, they are even better when 

we control for the effects of poverty: 

Middle-class students in well-funded schools, 

in fact, score at or near the top of world.

And he reminds us of the data: "Only four percent of children in high-scoring Finland, for example, live in poverty. Our rate of poverty is over 21%."

The older I get, the less patience I have with ouro monolithic educational systems --financed by the public's tax dollars-- continuing to be indifferent to recognizing, and fixing, the true "issue."