By Ilana Garon
Article Submission
In an article in Talking Points Memo, Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, contends that poverty is not, in fact, the problem holding back American school-children from parity with peer nations in tests like theProgramme for International Student Achievement (PISA), an OECD-sponsored test of academic skills administered to fifteen-year-olds in major countries nationwide. Despite a child-poverty rate of 22%, she asserts, American school-children are better off economically than many of their global peers, have more money spent on education than many of these peers, and–perhaps most damning–under-perform even at the highest economic echelons of American society (undermining the idea that America’s high rate of poverty is what causes it to lag behind in educational statistics.)