Study: Low-scoring teachers tend to work in schools with high poverty rates, By Juan Perez Jr., January 12, 2016, Chicago Tribune: “Elementary schoolteachers who scored lowest on Chicago Public Schools’ job performance evaluations were more likely to work at schools serving the city’s most disadvantaged students, an educational think tank concludes in a report released Tuesday. In observational evaluations and ‘value-added’ evaluations that adjust for the socioeconomic status of the student body, more teachers who received the lowest scores worked in schools with the ‘highest levels of poverty,’ according to the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research…”
Tag: High-poverty schools
Staffing at High-Poverty Schools
High-poverty schools often staffed by rotating cast of substitutes, By Emma Brown, December 4, 2015, Washington Post: “Mya Alford dreams of studying chemical engineering in college, but the high school junior is at a disadvantage: Last year, her chemistry teacher at Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse Academy quit just weeks after school started, and the class was taught by a substitute who, as Alford put it, ‘didn’t know chemistry.’ The year before, there was no permanent biology teacher until December. Students at Westinghouse, a high-poverty school in one of Pittsburgh’s roughest neighborhoods, often see a rotating cast of substitutes, Alford said. ‘You’re looking at test scores,’ Alford said of the school’s low performance on state standardized tests in math, science and reading. ‘But we didn’t have a stable teacher…'”
States and School Funding
- Few states set aside more funds high-poverty schools, report says, By Renee Schoof, June 8, 2015, Lexington Herald-Leader: “Most states don’t provide extra funding for high-poverty schools, according to a new report about how public schools are funded. The report, issued Monday, also found that only a handful of states that cut money for education during the recession have increased it again during the economic recovery. The analysis was by researchers at Rutgers University and the Education Law Center, a nonprofit group that advocates for equal opportunity in education…”
- Inequitable school funding called ‘one of the sleeper civil rights issues of our time’, By Emma Brown, June 8, 2015, Washington Post: “Funding for public education in most states is inadequate and inequitable, creating a huge obstacle for the nation’s growing number of poor children as they try to overcome their circumstances, according to a set of reports released Monday by civil rights groups. Students in the nation’s highest-spending state (New York) receive about $12,000 more each year than students in the lowest-spending state (Idaho), according to the reports, and in most states school districts in wealthy areas spend as much or more per pupil than districts with high concentrations of poverty…”