“Pupils Lose Ground in City Schools: The Longer Children Stay in the System, [the] More They Fall Behind.” This headline ran in the Baltimore Sun (Bowie, 1997),1 but it could apply equally to Chicago, Philadelphia, the District of Columbia, or any of the nation’s other large-city, high-poverty school systems. When they are evaluated against national achievement norms, these school systems almost always fare badly: their pupils lag behind in the early grades and fall farther back over time (e.g., Quality Counts, 1998). Such comparisons signal a problem of immense proportions, but whether these comparisons also show that the school systems in those communities are failing our neediest children, as the aforementioned headline seems to imply, is much less certain.