Poverty has a Powerful Impact on Educational Attainment, or, Don't Trust Ed Trust
Issue:
Jan 2002by Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California. Published in February 2002 Substance (5132 W. Berteau Ave., Chicago, IL 60641; csubstance@aol.com) and reprinted with permission.
Two critical responses exposing flaws in a report by Education Trust that claims to have found thousands of schools across the U.S. which serve large numbers of low-income children and which score high on standardized tests. See also FairTest Examiner summary and discussion (Winter 2001-02). Richard Rothstein also critiqued the Ed Trust report, with very similar results. His column is at
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/10/education/10LESS.html?pagewanted=print&pos
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/10/education/10LESS.html?pagewanted=print&pos
The powerful impact of poverty on literacy development has been well documented. Children of poverty, in addition to the obvious problems they face, have very little access to reading material ; they have fewer books in the home, inferior public libraries, inferior school libraries,and inferior classroom libraries, (e.g. Duke, 2000; Neuman and Celano, 2001). This means, of course, that they have fewer opportunities to read, and therefore make less progress in developing literacy.
The recent report from Educational Trust West (Ali and Jerald, 2001) appears, at first glance, to show that a significant number of children in poverty have overcome this problem. The report claimed to find 3,592 schools in the US that were "high-performing-high poverty" schools. In California alone, there were 355 high-performing-high poverty school. This result was considered sufficient to "dispel the myth" about