For anyone who pays attention to schools, the fact that poverty plays a key role in educational outcomes won’t come as a surprise. In education, income is a loud variable that makes actually understanding how schools are doing a bit like trying to stargaze amidst the flashing lights of Times Square.
Researchers, journalists and schools themselves have exhaustively documented that students at schools in wealthy areas tend to perform better on tests those attending schools in poorer neighborhoods.
Schools aren’t Faraday cages that block out all the challenges of the outside world. Kids bring those challenges into the classroom with them, and regardless of how talented a teacher is, students who are mal-nourished or haven’t slept well, for example, will have a harder time learning. They may have less experienced teachers or go to a school with higher turnover. Students in wealthier neighborhoods tend to have fewer of those challenges.
So, a few years ago, in partnership with UC San Diego Extended Studies Center for Research and Evaluation, we created a new metric for our yearly Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools (which came out this week) that seeks to cut through some of the noise.
Enter our income vs. test score figure: This figure uses the percentage of students at each school who qualify for free and reduced-price meals – the closest approximation for a school community’s poverty level – to project how we’d expect a school to score. From there, we bring in the school’s actual test scores to determine if they have exceeded or fallen short of that projection. Schools with scores of “0” are performing exactly as well their poverty level would indicate, while schools with scores above “0” are doing better and schools with negative scores are doing worse.
The results can be illuminating.
Edison Elementary in City Heights, for example, has pretty good scores. They’re not fabulous, but they are good. But when you take into account that 91 percent of Edison’s students qualify for free and reduced-priced meals, those scores look very different. Most schools with that level of poverty score far below average. Edison outperforms expectations by leaps and bounds – so much so that out of the 700 schools countywide we analyzed this year, Edison scored the highest on our income vs. test score metric.
We’ll have more on what Edison is getting so right soon, but eagle-eyed readers will recognize that name. Back in 2021, the school had the fourth-highest score in the county, which shows this isn’t some statistical anomaly. But the school’s trend-bucking dates back even further. In 2020, former education reporter Will Huntsberry dug into what made the school so special. Fun fact: the school was one of the inspirations for creating the income vs. test score metric.
Without the metric, the excellence of schools like Edison would be hidden by what appear to be just-OK test scores. It also gives parents a way to dig deeper than topline scores to see how much value each school is adding to a child’s education.
While there is a correlation between income and standardized test scores (which are a marker of proficiency in English and Math), to maintain that income matters more than instruction is to essentially provide an excuse for leaders in K-12 education to lower their expectations for low-income students and be satisfied with the status quo. This is, frankly, a disservice to low-income students, whose best chance for breaking the poverty cycle is a successful education.
As VOSD has pointed out in the past (and will likely address in an upcoming article), Edison Elementary bucks that “low-income household equals low educational outcome” narrative. It begs the question as to why SDUSD hasn’t researched the practices at Edison and used them to develop best practices across the district.
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To say that income matters more than instruction in standardized test scores is not an excuse. It’s a fact. While it’s important to acknowledge the role of quality instruction in student outcomes, research consistently shows that, on the aggregate level, income and socioeconomic status have a more significant impact on standardized test scores than instruction alone.
While schools like Edison Elementary provide a hopeful counter example, they are the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that, in the aggregate, low-income students face a host of challenges that affect their academic success, and income disparities often have more far-reaching effects than the quality of instruction can counterbalance.
That’s why this metric is so important. It can help identify higher income schools that are “coasting” based the student population. And those that are successful despite the demographics.