During the past two decades a substantial amount of educational research has focused on the relationship between socioeconomic status and school achievement. Many researchers believe that a strong correlation exists between these two factors while others present evidence to refute this hypothesis. It appears that most of these investigations fall into one of three categories. Arthur Jensen, a well known advocate of genetic determinism, contended that eighty percent of the variance in intelligence could be accounted for by hereditary factors. This position supported a belief that children from families living in poverty from one generation to the next tended to perform poorly in school environments due to inherent genetic inferiority
