Some teachers are blaming the lackluster economy for stalling educational progress, but the economy is not to blame, argue Michael Petrilli and Brandon Wright in a new Education Next feature.

“Where reform critics get it wrong is when they claim that America’s average scores are dragged down by the particularly poor performance of low-income students, or that the advantaged kids are doing just fine,” Petrilli and Wright write. “That is objectively untrue. And its scores are not dragged down by an unusually high proportion of poor students, as measures of absolute poverty find the U.S. not to be an outlier at all.”