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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The income distribution for dcps public school students is not bimodal.  There is a large number of economically at-risk students and then there are students spread across just about every single income step above that all the way up to very wealthy.  It is a pretty wide spectrum - lots of not at-risk but mostly just getting by families, lots of true middle class families, lots of economically secure but 150k does not go so far in major urban areas type families.  Lots of variations in the educational status of the parent(s).  Lots of variations in things like housing costs.[/quote]

This. The people who think it's just some very poor families and then everyone else is very well off are just very ignorant (and likely only interact with families in their same socioeconomic position and therefore don't think about or consider that anyone else exists).[/quote]

Or they can look at the distribution of income in DC from every source, see the barbell and make the appropriate inference. [/quote]

I haven't seen a single chart showing this barbell referenced.[/quote]

Got my cleats on to go to wherever you put the new post

https://ggwash.org/view/41080/heres-incomes-have-changed-in-dc-since-2000

[/quote]

While interesting, two things:

1) Those graphs are 10 years old. It's not a big deal, you can pull the more recent census data and it shows similar trends, but it might have been nice to go ahead and do that. And,

2) While this does show a barbell distribution for households in DC, it does not show a barbell distribution for families in DC, nor public school families in DC, nor public school families at specific schools. Not every household has kids, and not ever household with kids sends their kids to public school. This particularly impacts households on the right side of the barbell -- while you can assume that every family (or nearly every) under a certain threshold sends their kids to public school (because they cannot afford private nor do they have the resources to homeschool), you cannot make this assumption about the highest income households, many of whom will choose private. What percent? No idea, but it's more than zero. Which means that for public school families specifically, this may be more of a one sided barbell, with an inverse chart that would show income distribution for private school families.

And on a school by school basis, there are even more variables. Even if you could show that public school families had a barbell distribution in DC (something that has not been shown yet), this is across the entire system. Specific schools have different distributions based on neighborhood and lottery patterns. A lot of schools are majority at risk, including some schools where the number is over 90%, and those schools absorb a lot of the students on the left side of the barbell. There may be a handful that have a majority of families over say 250k, but I think for that you are talking about a TINY number of upper NW schools in very wealthy neighborhoods with major IB buy in, absorbing kids at that end of the barbell. Private schools also absorb a lot of those kids.

What's left? Middle class kids. Lots of public schools in DC are full of middle class kids.[/quote]

Seems pretty easy to look at the Title I data to see how many kids are middle class.[/quote]

How? Title 1 data will only tell you if a kid is designated at risk. There's no reliable, statistical way to differentiate the socioeconomic status of any other kid in the system. "Not at risk" could mean a family with an HHI of 120k, or a family with an HHI of 500k. Same bucket. And you can't use race as a proxy for income except in broad buckets (income distribution in DC means that few white families are poor and few black families are high income, but they cross at middle class which means that group is racially diverse).

You can't even look at the Title 1 designation for telling you how many kids at a school are middle class. It depends on the income of the surrounding neighborhood, the current state of gentrification, availability of charters desirable to high income parents, and the reputation of the school among wealthier families. Some Title 1 schools have very few or zero UMC or wealthier families in their "not at risk" ranks. Others have quite a few UMC/wealthy families, which will become especially obvious in a few years when the school is no longer Title 1 (this is often the first sign that Title 1 status is going to go away -- buy in from high income families).

But this is only something you can observe and guess at based on perceived incomes and the culture of the school. There is no data on it. I don't think DCPS even collects income data on families outside of the at risk designation (which is linked to SNAP and TANF qualifications, or the student being unhoused or part of the foster care system -- hard data that doesn't requiring estimating or guessing at a family's income or finances). I don't know how you'd cross-section census data against the public school system either, because the census data doesn't get into utilization of public schools, much less whether a family is using an IB or OOB school, or a charter versus DCPS.[/quote]

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