School disadvantage classification by free/reduced-price lunch quintiles within districts¶

Element · All elements
Evidence · 1 claim (1 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description¶

To measure school disadvantage, the study ranked schools "by grade span (elementary separate from middle school) within each district based on the percentage of their students eligible for free and reduced price lunch (FRL), an indicator of poverty", then divided them into five equal-sized groups. The first quintile represents the highest-poverty schools and the fifth the lowest. Across all districts combined, average FRL ranged from 92 percent in the highest-poverty elementary quintile to 33 percent in the lowest, with variation across districts. An alternative ranking by prior-year school achievement was used as a robustness check.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• District administrative data on student FRL eligibility by school
• Separate rankings for elementary and middle school grade spans

Constraints¶

• Differences between the highest and lowest quintiles varied by district, so the poverty contrast is not uniform across sites

Target Learners¶

• Students in elementary and middle schools across ten districts

Target Learning Goals¶

• Comparing low-income and higher-income students' access to high-performing teachers

Claims¶

• The distribution of highest-performing teachers across schools is statistically unlikely to be random, with significance for middle school teachers on both poverty and achievement groupings but for elementary teachers only on achievement groupings [+W]

Related Elements¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Steven Glazerman and Jeffrey Max. (2011). Do Low-Income Students Have Equal Access to the Highest-Performing Teachers? NCEE Technical Appendix. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20114016/pdf/20114016.pdf