affluent schools - poor schools

Today, schools are rated poorly if their students do not score well on state-mandated tests, regardless of whether children’s learning has been helped or hindered by the school environment. By the same token, schools serving affluent families in a resource-rich community are assumed to be good schools on the basis of children’s higher test scores, which may be high even in the face of a mediocre education. Downey and his colleagues [17, 34] have developed a new approach to measuring school performance that accounts for seasonal differences in learning, wherein the portion of student performance that can be attributed to the school is separated from the portion due to nonschool learning periods, including both during the period before a child enters school and over the summers as they progress through school. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), they find striking differences in school impact with this approach:

[O]ur analyses of reading suggest that 70 percent of currently labeled “failing” schools are not really failing…Many teachers and administrators working in schools serving disadvantaged children face a variety of challenges including scarce resources, large classes, and little parent involvement. Despite these conditions, a surprising number of professionals serving disadvantaged students appear to be doing a good job, much better than previously thought.
[17 p. 24]

Using this measure of “school impact,” in recent analyses of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), the researchers find that many schools considered “failing”—due to the low test performance of their students—are actually doing a better job of education than schools with much-higher-performing students.

from The Learning Season: (pdf file)