American schools have been given an impossible job, researcher Richard Rothstein asserts. The No Child Left Behind Act requires them to get students from all demographic groups to high academic standards without simultaneously addressing the external social and economic factors — poverty, substandard housing, inadequate health care, and the like — that put poor and minority students on average behind their middle-class peers. In his book, Class and Schools (Teachers College Press, 2004), Rothstein writes that “the influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well-designed are their instructional programs and climates.” Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and former education columnist at the