ABSTRACT
The OECD's report on PISA 2009 stated that “the socioeconomic background of students and schools does appear to have a powerful influence on performance” (OECD, 2010a: 13). The moderation of the language masks the usually taken-for-granted nature of the role of socio-economic status (SES) in students' educational outcomes. PISA also shows, however, that some countries are better than others at closing this educational ‘gap’. Structural and systemic factors are fundamental to closing the gap, but the OECD also argues that “The quality of the teaching workforce is a major consideration in any nation's aspirations for an educational system of high quality” (2004: 1). Previous research has highlighted the importance of classroom teaching on student academic performance in general (Newmann and Associates, 1996; Hill and Rowe, 1996; Creemers, 1996; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Hattie, 2003) and specifically on the achievement of students who live in poverty (Haberman, 1995; Hayes et al., 2006).
