What Do We Know About High Poverty Schools? Summary of the High Poverty Schools Conference at UNC-Chapel Hill

Despite a century of alternating progressive and traditionalist reforms and despite the unselfish and creative efforts of many in high-poverty schools and of the profession as a whole, such schools generally remain highly ineffective in terms of their ability to reduce the learning gap or to accelerate their students after the third grade.

S. Pogrow, 2006

Discourse about high poverty schooling generally revolves around three points of view. In the first, equity of school resources is considered to be the key ingredient in school improvement. In the second, no matter the school resources, there are successful high poverty schools, so therefore policy should focus on their example and not use poverty as an excuse for low performance.¹ Finally, some hold that without significant changes in overall social policy and economic opportunity, the impact of school reform will be limited.² This article summarizes the main points that emerged in the High Poverty Schooling in America conference which took place on October 13, 2006 at UNC-Chapel Hill and incorporates some of my own reflections about the conference. It focuses on the implications for policy and unresolved research and policy questions. The discussion at the conference mostly represented variants of the first two points of view, but in her keynote, Gloria Ladson-Billings eloquently raised the challenge the third point of view poses to all of us who sincerely want to improve educational equity.

At the conference, there was consensus on the unsurprising point that high poverty schools are below average in student achievement, graduation rates, and other important school outcomes. There was disagreement on the significance of the schools' contribution (as distinct from the contribution of external societal factors) to these negative outcomes, but agreement that schools should, at least, not reinforce social inequalities and hopefully play a significant role in alleviating them and promoting equality of opportunity. Even Russell Rumberger, who emphasized the importance of non-school inequalities, stated that in his study of elementary schools, the gap (while already significant at kindergarten) increased somewhat for African-Americans and decreased somewhat for Latinos.

First, the conference schedule (names in brackets refer to speakers listed below, unless otherwise indicated):

Table 1..

In her opening keynote, Ladson-Billings elaborated on a narrative of a cohesive and enduring social policy which disempowers and mis-educates children of color. She argued that social policies grounded in white supremacy need to be directly addressed and reversed before real improvement in education will be possible, or at least that a convergence of interest between whites and people of color needs to be strategized. Such a convergence of interests emerged, for instance, around the Brown decision — the need to respond to the end of plantation agriculture in the South, the need to end Jim Crow to improve the US image in the cold war, and the need to end separate and unequal education systems. The clear implication of her talk was that even significant, but partial, remedies such as funding equity or renewed efforts at desegregation, or more challenging curriculum, would not solve fundamental problems of educational inequities without a broader onslaught on white supremacy through a strategic realignment.

Participants in the conference raised a number of important questions in regard to equity of resources. Which resources are most important to equalize, or increase, for high poverty schools? According to the Education Trust, high poverty school districts receive an average of $907 less per student; for a school of 400, that's more than $350,000. The most inequitable states (New York and Illinois) have a $2,000 per pupil funding gap. In addition, the actual funding gap is typically an underestimate because of intra-district inequality that concentrates more experienced teachers in low poverty schools within high poverty districts. Since salaries are reported as district averages, this inequality is hidden.

There was much discussion on this key variable of teacher quality, commonly measured by years of teaching experience, Praxis test scores, and the rating of college attended.³ It...