America's Mediocre Test Scores: Education Crisis or Poverty Crisis?

AT A TIME WHEN the national conversation is focused on lagging upward mobility, it is no surprise that many educators point to poverty as the explanation for mediocre test scores among U.S. students compared to those of students in other countries. If American teachers in struggling U.S. schools taught in Finland, says Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, they would flourish, in part, because of "support from homes unchallenged by poverty." Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff at Columbia University's Teachers College argue that middling test scores reflect a "poverty crisis" in the United States, not an "education crisis." Adding union muscle to the argument, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten calls poverty "the elephant in the room" that accounts for poor student performance. But does the room actually contain the elephant? To prove that poverty is the major factor driving America's meager academic achievement, at least two of the following three claims need to be established: 1. Poverty is related to lower levels of student learning. 2. America's poor students perform worse than other countries' poor students. 3. The poverty rate in the United States is substantially higher than the rates in countries with which it is compared. Let's examine each in turn. Is Poverty Related to Lackluster Learning? To this first question, the answer is obviously in the affirmative. That's not to say "poor children can't learn." It is to say, rather, that there's long been a clear connection between families' socioeconomic status and students' academic achievement. As can be seen in Figure la, states with higher percentages of students from low income families report lower average scale scores in 8th grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) The same connection between poverty and academic performance can be observed at the school level  Why do kids from low income families tend to score so much lower on average than their more affluent peers? Is it something about poverty itself, that is, a lack of financial resources in the family? This is likely the case, as financial stress can create "toxic" conditions in the home and also make it difficult (if not impossible) for parents to afford the tutoring, educational games, summer camps, afterschool activities, and other educational experiences that middle class and upper middle class students take for granted (and that almost surely boost their achievement) But it's not just about money. Poverty is associated with a host of other social ills that have a negative impact on learning. For instance, children in poverty are much more likely to be living in single parent families headed by young, poorly educated mothers. Poverty is also associated with higher rates of alcoholism and other substance abuse in the home; greater incidence of child abuse and neglect; and heightened family involvement in the criminal justice system. All of these are well known "risk factors" that are associated with lower test scores as well as with a greater likelihood of dropping out of high school. So, yes, in general, poverty and factors correlated with low family income are strongly related to low test scores. Do U.S. Students from Low Income Families Underperform Their Peers Overseas? The next question is whether U.S. students from low income families are lower scoring than those in other countries. To explore this question, we're obliged to wrestle with measurement issues. The problem is complicated because no international data set contains both good measures of family income and good measures of student test score performance.