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No Easy Answers About NCLB’s Effect on ‘Poverty Gap’

Reasons exist to believe that the federal No Child Left Behind Act could shrink the “poverty gap” that finds students from poor families trailing behind their better-off peers in school. For one, by requiring schools to improve test scores each year for specific subgroups of students, such as those from lowincome families, as well as for everyone else, the law shines a spotlight on social inequalities that might once have been masked.

But reasons also exist to believe that the sweeping federal law could negatively affect schooling outcomes for children from the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Under the penalties embedded in the measure, for instance, struggling schools that serve predominantly poor student populations are the very schools most likely to suffer from a drain on resources as families take advantage of the tutoring or school choice options that the law provides.

To sort out the potential effects of the NCLB law’s various provisions on this vulnerable population, a group of researchers last month unveiled a volume of studies on the topic. Published by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, the new research collection takes many of its cues from the movement for standardsbased school reform that swept the country in the 1990s, predating the No Child Left Behind Act, which...