The Race to the Top Fund (Fund), a competitive federal grant fund designed to spur educational reform at the state level, exposes the major deficit in President Barack Obama’s plan for reforming this country’s persistently lowest-achieving schools: a reluctance to acknowledge explicitly the relationship between struggling schools and concentrated poverty. The Fund encourages individual states to implement reforms in four areas: enhancing standards and assessments, improving data use and collection, increasing teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution, and turning around our lowest-achieving schools.