Poverty has a huge impact on American PISA scores

[Hannah Bell]

American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country.

Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

This makes sense. Among other things, high poverty means less access to books at school, at home and in the community (e.g Krashen, 2004, The Power of Reading).

Less access means less reading, and less reading means lower performance on tests such as the PISA.

The PISA data can be found on page 15 (table 6) of Highlights From PISA 2009, available on the internet.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/poverty-has-huge-impact-on-american.html