He argued that school performance, in terms of exam results, needed to be judged on a five-year picture rather than one-off annual drops or increases.
And so, as you report, our kids' economic backgrounds are a better indicator of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France.
They note that the average school performance in 1997 had become the bottom marker by 2009, and that the number of failing schools had dwindled.
Since its run in Cardiff, Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage has achieved that figure only once, with a school performance in Oundle, Northamptonshire.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which monitors school performance in 37 states, has ranked California joint-last in mathematics, along with Louisiana, and near the bottom in everything else.
And coming from a poor family background, notes the France Stratégie study, seems to have a stronger impact on school performance in France than it does in other comparable countries.
For economically disadvantaged children and their families, only a comprehensive approach will affect school performance in a way that leads to dramatic increases in both high school and college graduation rates, which is how we should really measure our success!
Note that this doesn't say anything about what such IQ tests actually measure among the multitude of brain processes involved in "intelligent behaviour" (as Cameron Duodu points out in his blog), other than to correlate, as they are designed to do, with school performance in Euro-American schools.
Brad Duggan, the executive director of an independent research organization that tracks school performance in Texas, Just for the Kids, said that test scores have risen markedly in those poor districts that received additional money and then used it to finance early childhood programs, teacher training and teachers' raises.
Kandel and Kao (2001) find positive effects of parental migration on children's school performance in Mexico.
