Poverty is no excuse for poor academic performance. And it's not destiny, either, as a recent News analysis of the relationship between poverty and performance demonstrates.

No one disputes that children whose families are poor tend on average to do less well in school than their better-off peers, a fact as regrettable as it is well known. It follows that schools with a large percentage of children eligible for free-and reduced-price lunches (a common proxy for family income) tend to have worse results on Colorado's statewide tests, as measured by the number of children scoring proficient or advanced.

But just how strong is this tendency?

News reporters Nancy Mitchell and Burt Hubbard chose the state's fourth-grade reading test and investigated what has happened to the "poverty gap" since 1997, when the test was first given.

They divided a number of districts' schools into four groups, based on the percentage participating in the lunch program, and compared the top quarter, with the lowest poverty rates, and the bottom quarter, with the highest.

We looked at the correlation between high poverty and low test scores in a district. In Denver, the correlation turns out to be 0.88 - generally considered very high in an analysis of this kind.

The correlation is 0.81 in Aurora, also very high.

But Pueblo is different; its correlation is only 0.48.

Not only do students from Pueblo's poorest schools have much higher achievement than Denver schools with similar poverty levels. Poverty is less strongly associated with performance there than it is in Denver, Aurora and elsewhere.

Although adjusting for the size of schools would change the numbers slightly, the broad picture is clear: You don't have to eliminate poverty to improve school performance.

The News analyzed 12 large districts with significant economic diversity. Five showed a smaller poverty gap than in '97, five a larger one, and two were essentially unchanged.

In Pueblo the gap narrowed because performance improved in both the poorest and least-poor groups of schools, but faster for the poorest. Remarkably, the poorest Pueblo schools, with a 60 percent passing rate, are within a point of where the best-off schools were in 1997.

In Aurora, the gap narrowed because the best-off group stayed pretty much flat and the worst-off got better. That's not bad in itself, but 29 percent passing for the lowest group is still nothing to take comfort in.

In St. Vrain, the gap widened because the best-off group was flat and the poorest schools got worse. Bad news for both extremes of the student population.

And in Denver, the gap grew because the top group gained 13 points while the poorest group gained only 5 points. The widening gap isn't the problem for Denver. It's that in the poorest group, the average passing rate is only 22 percent.

The poverty rate in Pueblo's poorest schools is comparable to those in Denver, yet its passing rate is more than 35 points higher. So while the "poverty gap" might never disappear entirely, there is no reason for it to be anywhere near as large as it is.