In this provocative look at how social, political, and economic contexts inform the literacy education field, the author shows how competing representations of poverty underlie our assumptions about IQ testing, textbook content, national standards, standardized achievement tests, volunteerism, school/business partnerships, and other contemporary issues in education. Laying out careful critiques of initiatives like America Reads and popular texts like The Bell Curve , he offers a new theory of poverty which seeks to blur traditional class lines in America. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.