This bears repeating whenever the subject of high stakes testing comes up. There’s a very strong correlation between standardized test scores and family income. Test scores are higher in areas with high family income and lower in areas with low family income. It’s true in Tucson. It’s true in Phoenix. It’s true across the United States. It’s true in developed countries around the world (and probably even more true in undeveloped countries).
Based on information from international testing, we know that test score inequality is higher in the U.S. than other developed countries, but so is income inequality.
I created a few maps of the Tucson area awhile back with schools’ state grades and median household income to demonstrate how neatly the test score/family income correlation works out.
The map at the top of the post shows the state grades of all the schools in the Tucson area. Since state grades are mostly a reflection of the schools’ AIMS scores, a high grade generally means high test scores. I generated the map from the Department of Education website, then added colored clouds to emphasize the grade clusters. As you can see, Marana, Oro Valley, the Foothills and Vail have mostly A schools with a smattering of B schools thrown in. The B schools cluster just below the Foothills, the C’s are scattered from the center to the east of the city and the D schools are mainly in the south and southwest areas.
Anyone who’s lived around here for awhile doesn’t really need the second map to understand how closely the school scores align with the incomes of families living in those areas, but in the map below, the distribution of median family incomes lays any questions to rest.
Blue areas have the highest incomes, and the pinkish areas have the lowest incomes—the lighter the shade, the lower the income. The triangles are schools and their state grades. The colored clouds for the school grades match up incredibly closely with the income levels. (Note: Since the person who made this map for me left out the charter schools, the clouds on the two maps are close but not a perfect match.)
I’ve gone through the same process with a map of the Phoenix area and arrived at similar results, and all the literature indicates you’ll find the same correlation elsewhere.
What does this mean? It means we pretty much know how schools’ test scores are going to turn out, with minor variations and occasional exceptions. Generally, schools with high income students will get high test scores. and schools with low income students will get low test scores. In other words, most of what we “learn” from our arduous, costly regimen of high stakes testing, we already know. The scores have less to do with successful schools and failing schools than with the socioeconomic status of the kids who walk through the door. As for the exceptions, they tell us less than we might hope. The tests are such blunt instruments and gaming the tests to increase student scores, legally and illegally, is so prevalent, minor variations from what we expect tell us little about a school’s student achievement. As for those situations where the results are very different from what we might expect—usually schools with low income students who get high test scores—all too often, the unbelievable results turn out to be just that: unbelievable. We should have learned that lesson from schools in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington, DC, and most likely Arizona as well, and we have plenty of indications it’s true elsewhere. We’ve been fooled too many times. We shouldn’t let amazingly high test scores make fools of us again.
Of course, some schools really do get great results, and not because they cherry-picked their students or because they gamed the test. Some schools genuinely do an exceptional job with their students. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to catch that lightning, put it in a bottle and transport it to other schools. It’s not like building a thousand identical McDonalds and turning out identical burgers and fries at each location. Education doesn’t work that way. Sure, we can keep testing every student every year, year after year, and tell schools with low income students, “Your scores are too low. Be exceptional! Be exceptional!” We can also tell writers whose style and substance aren’t up to snuff, “Your writing isn’t good enough. Be Shakespeare! Be Shakespeare!” Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean those schools will end up being exceptional or those writers will end up being Shakespeare.
You want to test kids so we can get a snapshot of their achievement level and a rough idea of how well their schools are teaching them? Fine. Administer standardized tests to 3rd grade, 6th grade and 10th grade students. It’ll cost less, take up far less teaching time, create far less stress for students and staff and yield the same or better results as what we’re getting from this insane regimen of yearly high stakes tests.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2015.
The answer is simple. Take everything away from the A or green groupings and give it to the areas with poor test results. That way they would gain so much self esteem that their test scores would come up quickly. Why don’t we call it welfare, or better yet earned income tax credit?
That would have to solve it, wouldn’t it?
Now that I think about it, that’s the same map I saw for global warming. Do we have that solved yet? What’s the holdup?
Reality can be so hard for some to grasp.
Children have no input when it comes to the income of their family, they just have to learn to survive with much less than higher income families. Sometimes they don’t eat very well, sometimes they don’t have clean clothes to wear to school. Unfortunately their situation can affect their grades. No one is saying take from group A and give to group B, just understanding some of the causes might be more productive than pointing and being sarcastic. To each his own.
But that is exactly why we have open enrollment, charter schools, tax credits for private education and all the free lunch and breakfast programs we can stomach. Until you decide to take the child away from the under performing parent I don’t think you change the gene pool.
This is not meant to be sarcastic, except towards those folks that think we should redistribute wealth to try to change the outcome.
All men are created equal. They just don’t stay that way. I wish some could accept that without feeling guilt. It will not be changed.
Stop demanding the government solve everything, because they can’t.
The high correlation between test scores and family income (Socio-Economic-Status back in the seventies when I was doing research) is so well established it is not questioned or questionable. The same correlations hold in research into health outcomes, nutrition, employment and longevity, Knowing this, the question is how to develop policy stemming or reversing the effects of low income on quality of life outcomes. The answer, considering the results of anti-poverty legislation and programs dating back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society is “we don’t know.”
Here’s another correlation: Public School Per Pupil Expenditures and Graduation Rates. It might be assumed that spending more per student would result in higher graduation rates from high school. That assumption is wildly inaccurate; many cities and districts spending well above the national average per student, show some of the lowest graduation rates. Failure to graduate high school is virtually a guarantee of life lived on the far left side of the bell shaped curve of health and economic well being.
We can start improving all schools by throwing the Bush/Obama push for an educational-industrial-government complex into the dustbin of of history and looking for the what David calls “the lightning in the bottle” to study, understand and maybe replicate best practices. It would be a start.
So, David, do you believe in social security and medicare? Or would you rather have it privatized and you’re on your own. Government doesn’t solve everything, but sometimes they are the hand UP when people cannot change or better their situations. Good to know you have empathy for these children.
David,
Thank you for the good work, most informative. I do however, take great exception to the “income inequality” concept as being a key driver in the US. To be sure it does play a role as I have seen while working in many developing countries where the income inequality is far greater than in the Us, far greater. More on this later.
Much of what I see in the US is cultural, in my mind. Today, it seems that each ethnic group in search of its own identity has, in fact, established a sub-culture of sorts, which separates it from what many would consider main stream America. I certainly see this to be true in Tucson’s Mexican-American community today.
I am of Mexican-American descent and total integration into the American society was law in my home and most of my friend’s homes as well. I believe it worked very well and the cultural integration led to successful education. To be sure, this was many years ago and in a small town, but while I was attending what is now ASU in the mid-1950s, I saw much the same at work. In short, integration works, Balkanization or the development of separate and distinct cultures always fails.
For more than 30 years I have worked in developing countries in social and sustainable development programs. Thus, I have seen from the inside how income inequality truly can and does produce very differing results. Those who can afford it, send their children to private schools, some of which rival the best privet schools in the US and cost much the same. Others, less fortunate, must chose public schools, which more often than not, are abysmal, at best.
Where I receive great satisfaction is through project development, which brings in multiple job opportunities for many. This lifts many from poverty and allows them better choices for educating their children. However, the public system cannot and is not forgotten. Using cooperative programs, the companies I work for, always assist the various Ministries of Education in improving the schools in the area of influence. This is both infrastructure and teacher support based, even importing teachers to forgotten outpost, where most natural resource operations are found.
I have tracked many if not most of the projects I was involved in to learn from what works and what does not. To my great joy, I have now seen generational improvements – often quantum leaps in quality. Of course this requires development of natural resources, which I know many readers of this site oppose; unwisely, in my view.
Sorry fishfry I don’t oppose those two programs although they are wrought with fraud and waste. Once again you miss my point. Empathy alone solves nothing. Most government “handups” have actually perpetuated the problem. If that were not true LBJ’s war on poverty would have solved all of this. But once again no results.
Find a child in a low income family and pay their tuition to a private school and then tutor and mentor them to be more like you. That will change the country.
Take all the income away from celebrity hippocrates like Oprah, Streisand, Clooney, Gore, all tort Lawyer Liars, and waste it on these families that are incapable of proper parenting, not an income thing, and then see it fail as the trillions form the War on Poverty, have failed!
$$ alone are not the answer, personal responsibility and avoiding wast are. These are proven best practices…
Those in high income areas likely have a higher level of education (education is a direct factor in income). In turn, more often than not, they engage their children in a different manner when it comes to education throughout the lives of their children (especially at younger ages when habits are formed). I’m not saying its an absolute, but it is a major component. Parental involvement in rearing their children has a direct impact on the performance (or lack thereof) of their children.
More often than not when I speak to parents about the performance of their children, they share a common belief, and that is, “that they send their children to school for an education”. They don’t stay consistently engaged on helping with homework at home, or ensure adequate sleep, or perhaps foster poor behavioral habits, etc. which impacts their child’s performance at school. If we want to change the results of lower performing schools, we need to start with working on changing the belief or behavior of some parents, that its wrong to harbor the belief that they send their kids to school for an education and that it beings and ends there. They need to recognize its a team effort and that their involvement at home and in support of the work in the classroom has a meaningful impact.
I also recognize other socioeconomic factors are in play and impact children, as well as the quality of the teachers, etc. but I’d rank the influence and approach of the parents as the greatest factor based on experience.
“This bears repeating whenever the subject of high stakes testing comes up. There’s a very strong correlation between standardized test scores and family income.”
But yet never mentions that Sunnyside and TUSD are now ‘brown’ schools, where the illegals now outnumber citizens.
What is the correlation between illegals, family income and educational performance, hmmmmm? And why do the Grijalva’s and their army of leftists get away with downgrading the education of our citizens to exploit the dollars on the heads of illegals?
Also in his quest to blame poor performance on “whitey”, the writer fails to acknowledge the number of transfers into those “rich white” areas of Tucson like Catalina Foothills. Does the author ignore that almost 40% of their attendees fled other districts, specifically and mostly, TUSD? Is the author assuming or projecting that these students must have greater economic advantage because they fled the Grijalva/Bill Ayers indoctrination centers?
I find the ignorance toward the causes of poverty, and income inequality stunning. It’s all about blaming the victim when it’s poor policies controlled by a government bought and paid for to look after the interests the rich. LBJ’s policies did make a difference, so did FDR’s, but some prefer the era of the robber Barron’s. Then rely on self-serving justifications to blame the poor on being poor.
This link between standardised test scores and family income has been known (from the SAT and ACT) for at least 30 years. So what have we learned that we didn’t already know?
We know that poverty has an impact on learning. And yes we have known this for over 30 years and yet we prefer to blame the parents and the teachers.
A note to “What, Again.” The free and reduced lunch percentages at Catalina Foothills district schools range from 9% (Manzanita School) to 15% (Sunnyside Drive Elementary). If 40% of its students fled from other districts — I have no idea if the figure you stated is true — they must have come from the high end of the income pool.
I think a large part of that is the fact that higher income families are more involved with thier kids. There is also some thought that higher income families are more intelligent, or perhaps harder working or more highly motivated and that trait carries onto thier children. The higher functioning family unit generate higher incomes and thier offspring learn to become higher functioning as well. Of course there are exceptions but the “haves” have because they work hard and are intellegent. The “have nots” may work hard, but lack either the intellegence or motivation to be a “have”.
ed, I find your theory rather difficult to believe. Most of my best friends that I grew up with only had one parent living and the majority of us and our siblings have gone on to university-level education and have very good careers. I’m thinking of twenty-plus people here and out of the lot of us, I’m the only one who even has time to hang around on the computer. The rest of them are out enjoying their successful lives.
Sure, I have known some people who came from families that were well-off and then enjoyed some success, but the wealthiest people I know all started out in rather grim circumstances.
As a teacher in So. Cal, it all comes down to “literacy” and “value of education” in the home. You can be of low socioeconomic status, but value education and your children will succeed. If the parents in the home are not literate themselves, it’s a huge battle. i choose to teach in a low socioeconomic area. Half the battle is just getting the kids to school each day.
My brain hurts from all the nonsensical dumb coming from the crazed conservative trolls.
If you have the ability to drive your child across town, into the foothills, to attend school out of your failing neighborhood school you aren’t poor. Duh. In fact, this is specifically what was so malicious and disgusting with the state legislator opening every single school to open enrollment. It guarantees every involved parent will collect into a handful of excellent schools, turning the rest into abysmal hell holes of perpetual failure.
How disgusting does an individual have to be to erroneously even believe most of Tucson’s Mexican AMERICAN population is here illegally? This dolt must not be a native local or lived here long to be that freaking ignorant.
How oblivious to statistical fact do conservatives get? It’s not news that family income is directly correlated to educational outcomes of children. It’s not news that the American idealism of class mobility is not reality and that America has one of the lowest levels of class mobility of all ” wealthy ” nations. It’s called fact folks. I know fact isn’t popular with conservatives. This is a crowd that can say they’re not bigots while calling every non white in Tucson an illegal alien. This is the crowd that denies global warming while denying the wealth gap. This is the crowd that touts charter schools while mentioning school lunches ( not provided at almost all AZ charters ). The same crowd that sees nothing wrong with guaranteeing children with impoverished parents stay impoverished. The same crowd that thinks poor people are open enrolling and driving far across town into good schools. It’s just so sickeningly clueless.
This is just another reason why I advocate for teachers. ‘LET TEACHERS TEACH!!!” Plain and simple. If you are sick and visit the hospital the most important person to you at that moment is the doctor, During tax time the most important person at that time to you would be your accountant, when facing legal issues the most important person at that moment is your Lawyer. Like wise, when in school, the most important person to you at that time is your Teacher. Join me in spreading the phrase..”LET TEACHERS TEACH!!!”
Two comments: 1) to David W, LBJ’s “War on Poverty” was given up for a war in Vietnam. That’s ONE of the reasons that Bobby Kennedy was running against him/so disappointed in him. LBJ understood that you had to PAY for a war, and chose war over a war on poverty.
2) to several others: Low income parents, often single parents, are often working more than one low-paying job to just keep a roof & food going on. True, SOME moms/dads are NOT invested in education, for a variety of reasons. However, the sheer logistics of getting your kid to a school across town (a running vehicle, money for gas, time away from 1-2 jobs, unworkable bus system, etc), PLUS being involved in their homework (remember, working 2 jobs), simply doesn’t allow time enough in 24 hours to make it all happen. There are NO easy answers here. I happen to be one of those LBJ folks who got the hand up, and it’s paid off to society, and to my family.
Everything gives you cancer.
There’s no cure, there’s no answer.
~ Joe Jackson
Nothing new here Saifer…move along.
We all know that poor people get the short end of the stick. Unless you want to send your Bentley down to South Tucson to help some children get up to the “A” school in the foothills there is not much to do beyond paying your taxes.
A better question would be why have incomes stagnated ?
Why does the government neglect infrastructure maintenance and repair?
Why are 45 Million Americans on Food Stamps?
Who benefits as the US becomes a 3rd world country and the Great American Middle Class marches toward serfdom?
In other news helicopter flights from New York City to the Hamptons may be curtailed due to noise restrictions. It is getting hard to be a rich man in the city.
You have to lie to yourself to realize that the truth is…low income parents will drive their kids to the good neighborhoods once a year…on halloween to trick or treat…but not to pursue a better education. So their schools continue to stink.
Let’s go see what we can get for free….that has sugar in it.
David,
It is you that is missing the point. All your talking points are irreverent and taken straight from far radical right wing media. No one is talking about government trying to solve anything..no one is talking about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. I have an idea…why don’t you take your lazy, no nothing ass, and teach in those poverty schools and see how you fair. I don’t believe you would do it because you can’t listen to your daily dose of Rush Limbaugh kooldaide. Man the ignorance by right wingers is staggering.
Somebody woke up cranky today. And Koolaid only has one d and no e.
No nothing? I think it’s know nothing, but what do I no?
By the way I teach in those poverty schools. It doesn’t allow me time to listen to Rush Limbaugh. What does he talk about?
David W.,
I highly doubt that you teach in “those schools”, and if you do then I am sorry for your students. You clearly do not know your students or their families to speak as ignorantly as you do. I am a teacher and I do teach in a high poverty area and I hold my students to very high expectations. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a harder go at life than those who are better off financially. Perhaps you should really get to know your students and their families before passing judgement on an entire population. If you are a teacher, you should be ashamed of yourself.