This article explores the extent to which official social studies curriculum documents acknowledge difficult questions raised by the persistence of poverty in the United States. As it turns out, just as some parts of social studies curricula tell distorted stories about U.S. history, other parts tell misleading stories about the nation's present and future economic status quo. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the stories social studies curricula tell about people who are poor. Data for this article comes from a large-scale, bi-national study into how American and Canadian high school teachers educate students about the causes and consequences of economic inequality. The key finding is that poverty, despite its prevalence in the United States, rarely features in social studies curricula. In fact, 20 states do not mention poverty even once in their social studies curriculum framework documents. The authors present a composite curriculum framework that brings together content standards from various state curricula, the goal being to imagine a more comprehensive poverty curriculum that looks at structural-level analyses of poverty.