Not just Cleveland
Poverty is the major factor everywhere, not just Cleveland.
Sent to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 5, 2010
When discussing the Cleveland schools, Brent Larkin understands that it is hard to improve school achievement in the presence of "abject poverty" ("Peter Raskind starts atop bottomed-out Cleveland public schools," Feb. 5). But when Larkin discusses American students' performance on international tests, he appears to be unaware that the same factor is at work.
On the recent PISA tests, American 15-year-olds attending schools with less than 10% of students living in