In a breathless, Drudge Report-linked headline, the Washington Post reported last week that the “Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty.” A Huffington Post piece by Rebecca Klein, published 12 minutes earlier, sported a similar headline, “More Than Half Of American Schoolchildren Now Live In Poverty.” The only problem with these headlines, and the stories beneath them, is that they aren’t true—not even close. Both pieces were triggered by a report from the Southern Education Foundation. In 2013, some 19.9 percent of children in America were in families with income at the poverty line or below—in 2014, the...