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[quote=Anonymous]From the Schwartz Study:

School-related Findings
•	 School-based economic integration effects accrued over time. After
five to seven years, students in public housing who were randomly
assigned to low-poverty elementary schools significantly outperformed
their peers in public housing who attended moderate-poverty schools
in both math and reading. Further, by the end of elementary school, the
initial, large achievement gap between children in public housing who
attended the district’s most advantaged schools and their non-poor students in the district was cut by half for math and one-third for reading.

•	 The academic returns from economic integration diminished as school
poverty levels rose. Children who lived in public housing and attended
schools where no more than 20 percent of students qualified for a free
or reduced price meal did best, whereas those children in public housing who attended schools where as many as 35 percent of students who
qualified for a free or reduced price meal performed no better academically over time than public housing children who attended schools
where 35 to 85 percent of students qualified for a free or reduced price
meal. (Note that fewer than 5 percent of schools had more than 60
percent of students from low-income families, and none had more than
85 percent in any year, making it impossible to compare the effects of low-poverty schools with truly high-poverty schools, where 75 percent
to 100 percent of the families are low-income).

•	 Using subsidized meals as the metric for measuring school need might
be insufficient. The two different measures of school disadvantage used
in this study—subsidized school meal status and Montgomery County’s
own criteria—each indicate that children from very poor families
benefited over the course of five to seven years from attending low poverty schools. A comparison of the district’s own measure of school
disadvantage to the most commonly employed measure (subsidized
meals) yielded differently sized estimates of the benefits to low-income
elementary school children of attending advantaged schools. The differences suggest the shortcoming of the free and reduced-price meal
metric as a single indicator of school need.[/quote]

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