This understanding of low-income students’ school performance has important implications for school-reform efforts. For example, if good schooling cannot ordinarily be expected to have a large impact on poor students’ lives, this fact calls into question certain aspects of the “No Child Left Behind” movement of the last decade. This movement, begun by the federal government, uses students’ scores on standardized tests to assess the quality of their schools. Perhaps inevitably, the subsequent growth in standardized testing has meant that teachers’ performance ratings have become increasingly tied to their students’ standardized test scores. However, because students’ test scores reflect their socioeconomic backgrounds and other nonschool factors much more than the quality of their schooling, these scores are not a good measure of teachers’ performance. As one education specialist summarizes this situation, “Of all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective model to assess teachers. Studies have shown that over time, test scores do not provide a consistent means of separating good from bad instructors. Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside the teachers’ control can influence student performance from year to year—or even from classroom to classroom during the same year” (Russell, 2011, p. WK12). [4]
