One Thursday Afternoon

Dr. Boyd spoke to us about the relationship between education and poverty. When he presented his findings of median household income compared to test scores, I was very surprised. New York ranked about number 18 in median household income (a shocker in itself) and number 34 in the percentage of state-wide poverty. I must admit with all the multi-millionaires living it up in Manhattan, I expected New York to be much higher on the income scale. Mississippi was ranked last (50) in both of those categories. What Dr. Boyd found from these numbers is a correlation between poverty percentage/median income and test scores. States that ranked lower in median household income and higher in poverty percentage tended to perform lower on the 4th grade reading exam.

But as I sat there reading these stats I couldn't help but notice that the states doing the worst in these categories are southern, former Confederate states. The majority of these states are rural, some with very poor residents. But then I think of the urban poor in the inner cities of places like New York, Chicago, and Detroit. They probably have just as many poor residents as these southern states except more densely populated, therefore the percentage of poverty would be lower in states with urban poor neighborhoods. I guess what I'm ultimately trying to say is that I don't completely trust his findings. He is a brilliant man and has an excellent resume but I think there are more things that need to be controlled for or taken into consideration before using the data to find questionable correlations.