High Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage and NCLB

1. High Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage and NCLB Douglas N. Harris Florida State University

2. Education Trust Report • More than 3,000 “high flying” schools • High-poverty means more than 50% of students in eligible for FRL • High-performance means top-third in either reading or math in a single year • Report was widely cited in the media: New York Times, Wash. Post, USA Today • More importantly, the interpretations reinforce a false assumption of NCLB

3. Problems with the Report • Methodological problem: Report doesn’t require consistent performance; regression to the mean - high-poverty schools are less consistent • Interpretation problem #1: Report implies that student disadvantage is unimportant, even though the data say nothing about this • Interpretation problem #2: Report ignores vast amount of evidence that student disadvantage is important

4. New Analysis

5. New Analysis

6. Analysis Summary • 1 in every 100 high-poverty schools is consistently high-performing—a “high flyer” • 1 in every 300 high-poverty, high-minority schools is a high flyer • A low-poverty, low-minority school is 89 times more likely to be high-performing than a high-poverty, high-minority school • Analysis of Heritage Foundation report suggests that even these few may not really be high flyers

7. What Does this Mean? • Obviously a disturbing picture • But it says little about the causes behind the gaps, contrary to ET interpretation • The age-old debate: school effectiveness versus student background • The age-old result: from other research, student background matters more • “starting gate inequalities”