At a time when the national conversation is focused on lagging upward mobility, it is no surprise that many educators point to poverty as the explanation for mediocre test scores among U.S. students compared to those of students in other countries. If American teachers in struggling U.S. schools taught in Finland, says Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, they would flourish, in part, because of "support from homes unchallenged by poverty." Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff at Columbia University's Teachers College argue that middling test scores reflect a "poverty crisis" in the United States, not an "education crisis." Adding union muscle to the argument, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten calls poverty "the elephant in the room" that accounts for poor student performance. But does the room actually contain the elephant? To prove that poverty is the major factor driving America's meager academic achievement, at least two of the following three claims need to be established: (1) Poverty is related to lower levels of student learning; (2) America's poor students perform worse than other countries' poor students; and (3) The poverty rate in the United States is substantially higher than the rates in countries with which it is compared. Each of these claims is examined in this article.