Poverty and Access to Print

Here's a link to an article on a study predicting test scores from "environmental factors" (the home). Scroll down to Stephen Krashen's comments. Here's some of it:

Of great interest is the fact that McQuillan (The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions) was able to predict 71% of the variability on fourth grade NAEP scores using only poverty and access to print as predictors, and was able to predict 59% using only poverty and amount of free reading children did as predictors. (That is, knowing the poverty level and access to print (school, home, community) is 71% of the information you need to predict the NAEP score, etc.

(italics mine)

I have a field trip to the library planned this January. Stay tuned.