From Education Week:
Guest post by Stephen Krashen.
In “Flunking the Test,” Paul Farhi concludes that the media has seriously under-reported the successes of American education and have taken the pronouncements of self-proclaimed “reformers” at face-value. Farhi backs up his argument with real data: American students’ performance on international tests is much better than critics say it is, and college attendance has increased enormously.
Farhi cites Pedro Noguera, who in turn mentions a Dan Rather program that “explored the link between school performance and poverty, a subject often ignored or noted only in passing in many stories about academic achievement.” As Farhi notes, research shows that poverty is “the single greatest variable in educational achievement.”