Today's guest blog is written by Pamela Cantor, M.D.  Pam is the President and CEO of Turnaround for Children.

Every three years, 15 year-olds from around the world take a test to measure proficiency in reading, math and science, and every three years, the results for American students disappoint. Here are the latest: 36th place in math (behind Slovakia but just ahead of Lithuania), 28th in science, and 24th in reading (5 notches below Vietnam). Disappointing, but not the whole story.

In US schools where the poverty rate is less than 10% our students finish at or near the top of the world. However, in schools where the poverty rate climbs past 75% the US drops toward the bottom of the pack, (after Cyprus and Kazakhstan).  

What does that tell you? One thing it tells me is that schools with high concentrations of poverty are at high risk for academic failure.  Dig deeper and discover what is at the root of this risk: a predictable, recurring set of cognitive, social, and emotional obstacles to learning that stem from the stress of poverty. The good news is that knowing this enables us to design schools to address these obstacles and help all children, no matter their zip code, succeed.

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