1. seed
  2. No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

By milhayser on April 7, 2011.

The science portion of The Nation's Report Card was released on February 24th, with test scores from school districts in seventeen urban centers. Almost every district performed below the national average. Greg Laden explains, "Poverty determines the outcome of the results, and this is probably exacerbated in urban zones where private schools siphon off the small number of higher-income kids." Although Department of Education officials were firm in their stance that "correlation does not equal causality," Greg plots test scores against poverty level in the cities surveyed and reveals a very clear trend. Mike the Mad Biologist produces a similar slope using data from Massachusetts, where "a one percent increase in school lunch eligibility means the expected percentage of poorly performing students in math increases 0.88%." He concludes, "our educational 'crisis' is one intimately associated with poor children. Yet our political betters refuse to comprehend that."

Tags
education
poverty
testing

More like this

Poverty and Science Performance: Yep, Still Linked
A while ago, I looked at the relationship between poverty and educational test scores in Massachusetts, which, on the whole, performs the best in the U.S. Not surprisingly, as poverty increases, performance decreases. The pattern also holds for science scores on the state exam, the MCAS: The…
The Nation's Science Report Card is out. Everything is going fine.
The Science component of "The Nation's Report Card" was released today and clearly indicates that we have moved one step closer as a nation in two of our most important goals: Building a large and complacent poorly educated low-pay labor class, and increasing the size of our science-illiterate…
Poverty and Science Education in Massachusetts
Yesterday, I described the relationship between low-income and poor performance in English and math in Massachusetts (see the post for methodological details). Well, I've saved the worst for last--science education: Just to remind everyone, the horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a…
Poverty and Learning in Massachusetts
I've described before how there is a significant correlation between poverty and educational performance when we use state-level data. But as I pointed out, one of the interesting things is that the residual--the difference between the expected scores for a given state and the actual scores--can…