Urban and Suburban classrooms, the real story

I'm still responding to the Sunday edition of the Lowell Sun, since a front-page article by Rebecca Piro ("A Tale of Two Classrooms") seemed to me to be deliberately misleading. The subheading, still in large, bold print, which is reprinted on page 4, where the article continues, reads "Urban, Suburban classrooms share common challenges." The body of the article describes two fourth-grade classrooms, one at the Lincoln School in Lowell and one at the Heath Brook Elementary School in Tewksbury. In both classrooms, the teachers face the higher standards of the era of MCAS and No Child Left Behind and must teach the "crucial English and math skills students need to earn their high-school diplomas". In that respect, it could be said that the classrooms share common goals. To say that they share common challenges is ludicrous. A look at the statistics accompanying the article tells the real story: Tewksbury has 5.7% low-income students, Lowell 67.7% and even more telling, Tewksbury has zero limited English proficient students, while Lowell has 23.5%. Those differences alone more than outweigh the $1,000 more per pupil that Lowell spends. In addition, as the article points out, only 5% of Heath Brook's fourth-graders failed MCAS in English and 10% in math; at the Lincoln School, the failure rate for last year was 29% in English and 31% in math. The numbers tell the story, not the headlines.