Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from…

The authors examine whether standards based accountability reforms of the past two decades have closed the achievement gap among public and private high school students. They analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine sector differences in high school achievement in the era of standards based reforms. The authors found…