Background: The Hawaii Department of Education (HDOE) launched its Hawaii State Assessment (HSA) in spring, 2002, within the context of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Act of 2001 and its mandates to close the "achievement gaps" between subgroups of students. Thus, it is important to investigate the extent to which student performance on the 2002 HSA was determined by economic disadvantage and minority status to provide a clear baseline to judge progress in Hawaii's public schools to ensure educational equity. Purpose: The present study addresses three specific research questions: (1) To what extent is HSA reading performance influenced by gender, poverty or ethnicity separately? (2) Is there a general pattern of the effects due to the three demographic variables across the grade levels? (3) How accurate are the predictive models with respect to different racial/ethnic subgroups? Study Sample: The data set includes 9,257 third graders (75.35% of all third graders who took the HSA), 9,602 fifth graders (77.01%), 8,043 eighth graders (75.73%), and 6,504 tenth graders (71.72%). Findings: Girls have significantly lower failure rates than boys. Students eligible for free or reduced price lunch have significantly higher failure rates than their ineligible peers. East Asian and White have quite similar failure rates, which are clearly lower than those of the Filipino and Hawaiian groups. A general logistic model consisting of three main effects can correctly classify about 65% of the students in each grade and maintain a fairly consistent pattern of significant effects due to gender, low-income status and ethnicity. The racial/ethnic distribution of incorrect predictions of the model (false negatives and false positives) deviates drastically from the expected proportions at each grade level. Conclusion: This research provides a preliminary understanding of what roles gender, low-income status, and race/ethnicity, played, individual jointly, in determining students' reading performance in the NCLB baseline year of 2002. The research also reveals the hitherto undocumented success story that many educationally disadvantaged Filipino and Hawaiian students, with support from Hawaii's public education system, have proved to be capable of overcoming their odds of failure and reaching the HSA proficiency level. (Contains 4 tables.)