Student Performance and Poverty

In the past couple of months I‘ve seen conflicting reports on how American students who do not live in poverty perform on the Programme for International Student Assessment. One report (What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance?) indicated that when compared to all students, American students in this category compare favorably to their peers in the world.  Another report (Middle Class and Middle of the Pack) stated that this same group of Americans is falling behind their peers globally. The gist of this second report is that you can’t blame the mediocre US student performance on poverty. In response to these studies I decided to find out how our students of means perform on the annual state tests. Our data specialist disaggregated our students by subgroups including socioeconomic status, ethnicity and other learning categories such as students with disabilities and limited English proficiency.  As expected, the group of students who are not a part of any of the subgroups perform extremely well on the state tests.  While this does not necessarily give us reason to announce we have arrived, it does indicate that what we are offering this group of students is working.

As is always the case at this time of year, we are in the midst of trying to secure enough funding from the borough and state to maintain our current level of service.  Our lower performing sub groups are those students who need an extra layer of support; to do so requires adequate funding. The irony of the tightening of money for schools, is that it affects those students who need it the most more than it does our students of means.  We are thus in an interesting predicament of trying to meet increased expectations (a good thing) with less money to support our neediest students. With one week to go in this legislative session, let’s ensure that our legislators understand this.