Funding, Schunding!
It's hard to think of an article that could get more stuff wrong than this one from the Connecticut Council for Education Reform:
Today, we are taking a look at an argument frequently made in opposition to education reform: namely, that Connecticut’s achievement gap - which is the largest in the nation - is due to poverty, and therefore, the education system, and the adults within it, cannot be held responsible for providing a high-quality education to all students.While poverty and a lack of parenting are used as convenient scapegoats to explain the achievement gap in Connecticut, Massachusetts has skipped the blame game, and worked on addressing the issue instead. In 2010, Massachusetts and Connecticut had almost exactly the same percentages of students who were low-income (34.2% in Massachusetts vs. 34.4% in Connecticut). Nonetheless, on national math assessments in 2011, Massachusetts’ low-income 4th graders scored 2nd in the nation – while Connecticut’s low-income students scored 48th. This difference in performance between Massachusetts’ low-income students and Connecticut’s equates to about 1.5 grade levels.In fact, the low-income students in all of our neighboring states outperform Connecticut’s low-income students. For instance,