Every year, New York's Department of Education releases its "report cards" on the public schools, listing how their students did on standardized tests. Every year those report cards show that students in wealthy and middle class suburban districts generally score higher than those in urban-particularly inner-city-schools.
If ever there was a dog bites man story, the report cards are it. To anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past half-century, it's hardly news that students whose parents are well-educated and financially well off usually do better on tests.
Yet most news organizations across New York - and the many other states that release similar reports - dutifully publish the test results, implicitly telling our readers and viewers how much better schools in well-to-do neighborhoods are than those in poorer communities. In talking with university researchers who study what differentiates "good" schools from "bad" ones, however, we found out they believe many inner-city schools are actually accomplishing astounding results given the poverty-related difficulties they have to deal with.
Against the odds
To demonstrate that point, we decided to take the best available poverty data for each school-the percentage its students receiving free lunches - and analyze their test scores compared to their poverty level. (One caution: using free lunch as a poverty indicator works fine at the elementary level. But once children reach junior high school, many refuse to take part in the program because of the embarrassment of being identified as "poor." It's not a good substitute for actual income figures.)
Using SPSS, we ran a regression analysis that, in short, showed us how each school's test scores compared to average scores for schools with the same poverty rate. The result: In our Albany backyard, we had one of the best elementary schools in the state, although we never would have known it based on its raw test scores.
School 20's raw scores, in fact, were slightly below average. But with 96 percent of its students participating in the free lunch program, it should have had test scores that scraped the bottom. In fact, School 20 ranked among the top 70 of nearly 1,900 public elementary schools in New York. Sitting less than a mile away, in the adjoining attendance district, was Albany's Philip Schuyler Elementary School. Schuyler, with a slightly lower free lunch rate, had even lower test scores, ranking among the bottom 20 percent of schools in our regression analysis.
Poor vs. poor
We decided to take an in-depth look at the two schools, which were dealing kids from essentially the same demographic groups, in order to determine what made one so much more successful than the other. But first, we had to make sure that, in fact, the student bodies were very similar in makeup. We did that by plugging the attendance boundaries for each school into MapInfo, then adding county census and welfare data. We interviewed academics about what to look for in the schools, factors like teacher involvement in educational decision-making, good library resources, or strong leadership from the school principal. The next step getting into the schools - was surprisingly easy. The district superintendent and both principals gave a reporter and photographer free rein to roam the halls and classrooms. What we found helped us dispel the notion that inner-city schools are by definition worse than their suburban counterparts. In fact, our regression analysis found that several suburban schools scored far lower than would be expected given their low poverty rates. The regression showed a 75-percent correlation between poverty rate and test scores, which means statistically that poverty "accounts" for three-fourths of how kids do on tests. As a newspaper based in the state capital, we didn't take long deciding, that we ought to take a look at what the state government was doing about providing extra resources to poorer districts, since poverty is a significant determinant of performance.
Misapplied aid
Like most states, New York funds its schools primarily through local property taxes. But it also hands out more than $10 billion annually in school aid. In theory, more money is supposed to go to school districts with the least resources per student. In reality, powerful legislators from suburban districts have made sure their schools get sizable chunks. We analyzed state Department of Education data concerning aid compared with poverty rates among school-age children in the districts and found that the state's aid system was completely out of whack. For example, the city of Albany has the 26th-highest child poverty rate in the state but ranks 543rd in state aid. Buffalo, with the highest poverty rate and the lowest median income, is 186th in state aid. With a citizens' lawsuit already challenging the state aid formula, advocates for restructuring it were planning to use the same type of analysis as we did to support their case.