Exploring Disparities in Enrollment and Its Relationship With Academic Outcomes

• In Event: School Choice, Stratification, and Civil Rights: The Buffalo Story

Abstract

This paper explores disparities in student enrollment and its relationship with academic performance.

Disparities in academic achievement among students of color have become more serious, particularly in impoverished schools that have a disproportionate proportion of students from low-income families. Under some school choice systems that ignore issues of race and poverty, students may have limited access to a strong school with challenging peers and educational programs. This paper investigates Buffalo Public Schools (BPS), an urban school district with a choice system. Students must apply and are selected using several criteria to attend the district’s most competitive schools.

A pair-wise correlation analysis was conducted in order to investigate the relationship between academic outcomes and race/poverty.

We analyzed the results of New York State’s mathematics assessment, which is administered to students in kindergarten through twelfth grade who are enrolled in public, nonpublic, and charter schools throughout the state. Mathematics is often used for such comparisons because it is less skewed by non-school differences in language development.

First, we explored mathematics assessment scores for students in grades three to eight to investigate to what extent the scores are linked with the proportion of students living in poverty and percentage of students of color—specifically, black and Latino— in a school. Findings showed that large numbers of schools with high shares of low-income students in BPS tended to lag far behind in mathematics assessment scores. Assessment scores were negatively correlated with the black and Latino share in a school. Findings also indicated that test scores were more strongly linked with the proportion of low-income students than the proportion of black and Latino students.

Second, we analyzed relationships between mathematics scores for high school students and the share of students of color and students from low-income families. For this analysis, we examined the combined share of students who scored below proficient (at Levels 1-2) and proficient or higher (at Levels 3-4), respectively. Findings showed a very strong and positive correlation between the share of students living in poverty and the combined share of students who were below proficient on the statewide mathematics assessment. The black and Latino share was also highly associated with the proportion of students who were below proficient, but the test scores were more linked with the low-income share. In contrast, we found a clear pattern that schools with a larger proportion of non-poor students tended to have more students who performed well. The analysis showed that the proportion of students who were proficient or higher was negatively associated with the share of economically disadvantaged students. In addition, the correlation between the percentage of high-performing students and the share of students of color was weak.

This study reconfirms the issue of disparities in segregated schools and its relationship with academic outcomes. This study also reveals the reality of structural segregation due to a school choice system that ignores issues of race and poverty.

Author

• Jongyeon Ee, University of California - Los Angeles