by John Butcher
A recent study out of Stanford looked at 11 years of district-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data by race and economic disadvantage from all public school districts and concluded that racial segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in third grade and the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The association of racial segregation with achievement gap growth is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty (termed “racial economic segregation”). Thus, racial segregation is harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are on average less effective than lower-poverty schools.
On the subject of economic disadvantage, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) database offers Virginia SOL data on a granular level, so let’s look at some of those numbers. In particular, the graphs below present 2022 SOL pass rates by subject, per school, for students who are economically disadvantaged (“ED”) (i.e., those who qualify for the free/reduced lunch program, TANF, or Medicaid) and for their more affluent peers (“Not ED”).
Notes: The percentage of ED students below is calculated from the number of ED students taking a particular test and the number of Not ED students taking that test. Data are school averages for the subject area for all grades tested, 3-8 and End of Course. The VDOE suppression rules omit data for just over 3.5% of the entries in the 2022 SOL database, primarily for cases where the number of students in a group is <10.
Aggrieved note: As of 12/20/22 and again on 12/29 (well after I complained), the links on the VDOE Web site to the data dictionary (definition of “economically disadvantaged”) and to the suppression rules, among others, do not work.
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