Correlation between poverty, low school achievement

by David Safier

No one should
be surprised to hear that schools with more low income students also
tend to have low test scores. But it's still amazing to see how clearly
the Arizona stats make that correlation.

A reader sent me an excel spreadsheet of data he compiled from 3 public sources on the AZ Ed Dept website: AZ Learns Achievement Profiles, No Child Left Behind Yearly Progress Reports and Free/Reduced Lunch Reports. The results? More free and reduced lunches mean lower performance scores.

Here are the overall state numbers:

• Excelling Schools: 21% of students on free/reduced lunch
• High Performing Schools: 43% of students on free/reduced lunch
• Performing Plus Schools: 71% of students on free/reduced lunch
• Performing Schools: 71% of students on free/reduced lunch
• Underperforming Schools: 84% of students on free/reduced lunch
• Schools Failing to Meet Academic Standards: 85% of students on free/reduced lunch

(The stats don't include every AZ school, since not all schools are listed on the three websites.)

For anyone who sees charter schools as saviors that will right all educational wrongs, their numbers were almost identical to district school numbers.

Not all schools with high free/reduced lunch numbers fall
into the lowest categories. Another table on the spreadsheet lists 62
schools across the state that earned highly performing and excelling
ratings and have 60% or more students on free/reduced lunch. The TUSD
schools making the list: Bonillas Elementary, Borton Primary Magnet,
Corbett Elementary, Tully Elementary, Wheeler Elementary and Alice Vail
Middle.

While schools and individual students can beat the odds, it's
always an uphill battle, and even the most talented educators and
successful schools admit it's very, very hard to duplicate their individual
successes. Poverty is a primary cause of academic failure, and educational reform alone won't change that fact.

We're not going to do much to increase the achievement of our lowest achieving students if we don't do something to ease the burden of poverty at the same time we help poor parents learn ways to help their children succeed in school.