Reply to What's it like to be in a new charter school in its first year?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP here, with a p.s. Does it really make a big difference in the early years if your bright kid has two vs, ten high-achieving classmates? I had read that studies had shown that bright kids do well regardless of the context.[/quote]
http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb571/kahlenbergsoa6-15-06.pdf

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. 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. 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.

All students—low income and middle class—perform relatively poorly in high-poverty schools, but are middle-class students hurt by the presence of some low-income students in majority middle-class schools? The evidence suggests that they are not. Research finds that the numerical majority of students set the tone in a school; so long as concentrations of poverty do not reach above the 50 percent level, the academic achievement of middle-class students does not decline. Research also finds that middle-class students, on average, are less affected (for good or ill) by school environment than low-income students.[/quote]

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