"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story"*

The current batch of education debates is, purportedly, between those who think you can fix everything about a kid's life and future by "fixing" schools, and those who think that issues surrounding schools have an enormous impact on what goes on inside the schools, and thus those issues must be dealt with as well.
(Note: this is of course a vast over-simplification of both points.)
The "poverty matters" crowd got a bit of a boost this week when the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report to:

examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state’s working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state’s eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.

Decent coverage here.
Two important points:

1. One hopes that this will lower some of the shrillness of rhetoric of those who claim others want to "hold off on fixing schools" until...whenever. It would be helpful if we could acknowledge that a community being under economic duress does change how the community's children do in school.
2. Might perhaps this change how we're dealing with NCLB?

*as oft cited by my dad's former boss, Bob Berkowitz