Quotes: You Think Fixing Education Is Hard? Try Poverty.

So is the answer to address concentrated poverty? Sure. Except that, if anything, attempts to address poverty have a worse track record than attempts to improve education. Hell, attempts to address poverty have such a bad track record that even credulous pundits rarely bother writing about it anymore. Nobody really seems to have any compelling answers, and for about 90% of the country it's just too easy to ignore the problem entirely. 

Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones (2010) Schools and Poverty