What, then, do the critics of the corporate reform agenda propose? Surely they can't be defending the status quo, content with the current state of schools. No. Without being too unfair to the diversity of views on this, the key consensus is that the most important step we could take to deal with our education problems would be to address poverty in the United States. We don't have an "education problem." The notion that we are "a nation at risk" from underachieving public schools is, as David Berliner asserts, errant "nonsense" and a pack of lies.

 

Rather, we have a poverty problem. The fact is that kids in resource-rich public school systems perform near the top on international measures. However, asDavid Sirota has reported, "The reason America's overall scores on such tests are far lower is because high poverty schools produce far worse results -- and as the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world, we have far more poverty than our competitors, bringing down our overall scores accordingly." Addressing poverty and inequality are the keys to serving America's educational needs.