Brian Crosby at our group blog, In Practice, just alerted readers to a new article by Richard Rothstein, called Whose Problem is Poverty?

Rothstein is one of my favorite education writers. In fact, on one of my “The Best…” lists I named an article he wrote last year as The Best Article About Education — 2007.  He’s the former education writer for The New York Times.

He gives a good summary in this most recent article of one of his main themes — that a lot of the reasons behind lower academic achievement are non-school related, and that if our society is serious about helping students improve we need to deal with issues like the lack of affordable housing and adequate health care for low-income families.