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[quote=Anonymous]http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb571/kahlenbergsoa6-15-06.pdf

THE CHALLENGES OF CONCENTRATED POVERTY

NCLB sets out the lofty goal of making all public school children—poor and wealthy, black and white—“proficient” in reading and math by 2014. Given that in recent years, the average low-income twelfth-grade student has been reading at the same level as the average eighth-grade middle-class student,1 many teachers and administrators are at a loss as to how to reach the act’s laudable aim. How can the achievement gap be narrowed, much less eliminated?

Bold action is required, action that is dramatically different from what we have been trying in education for many years. For forty years, researchers have found that schools with high concentrations of poverty present a very difficult environment for student learning. While a small portion of high-poverty schools that have charismatic principals and especially dedicated teachers have proven to be successful, the overwhelming majority of high-poverty schools struggle. According to a study conducted by Florida State University’s Douglas N. Harris, middle-class schools are twenty-two times more likely to be consistently high-performing than are high-poverty schools.

Of course, high-poverty schools are less likely to perform well in part because individual low-income students are, on average, less likely to come from family environments that model and support strong academic achievement. But there is a separate problem that arises when low-income students are concentrated in schools separate from their middle-class peers.

The highly regarded Coleman Report of the 1960s found that, after the influence of the family, the socioeconomic status of a school is the single most important determinant of a student’s academic success.2 The basic findings of the report—that all children do better in middle-class schools—have been affirmed again and again in the research literature.3 In 2005, for example, University of California professor Russell Rumberger and his colleague Gregory J. Palardy found that a school’s socioeconomic status had as much impact on the achievement growth of high school students as a student’s individual economic status.

Throughout history and throughout time, low-income students typically have performed less well academically than middle-class children, but there is a striking exception: low-income students attending middle-class schools perform better, on average, than middle-class students in high-poverty schools. Scores from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among fourth-grade students in math indicate that low-income students in more affluent schools score eight points higher (more than half a grade level) than middle-class students in high-poverty schools.
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