Students from low-income backgrounds face a variety of social and economic challenges that make it more difficult for them to achieve their potential. 2 To make matters worse, low-income students often attend public schools that receive less funding than schools serving more affluent students. It is also clear that some states do a far better job of educating low-income students than others. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, there is a massive gap between the states with the highest-performing low-income students and the states with the lowest. The Center for American Progress wanted to better understand the role of standards-based reform in promoting student outcomes. They studied the most recent NAEP data. Given previous research, they believed that they might find a strong connection between standards-based reform and student outcomes. Because it can be hard to make clear connections between policy and outcomes, some of the analysis is anecdotal in nature. The authors used more-empirical tools for the study, relying on a statistical approach known as a regression analysis to unpack the relationship between standards-based reform and student outcomes. For that part of the analysis, they looked specifically at the performance of low-income students on NAEP over time in relation to a state's standards-based reform efforts, as measured by the Education Counts database maintained by "Education Week." Based on the analysis, it was found that: (1) Over the past decade, many states that have not fully embraced standards-based reform have fallen behind, while states that have thoughtfully pushed standards have shown clear gains; (2) Implementing standards-based reform significantly improved learning outcomes for low-income students in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading; and (3) States posting poor results are among those looking to leave the Common Core State Standards, or Common Core--a set of higher academic K-12 standards in reading and math--which were developed and adopted by governors and chief state school officers in 2010. Methodology is appended.