Craig D. Jerald, The Education Trust, 2001
Craig D. Jerald of The Education Trust here provides information on how many schools in the United States are simultaneously high-poverty or high-minority AND high-achieving. The study uses a federal database developed by the American Institutes for Research utilizing school-level assessment data from nearly every state and cross-referencing it to the "Common Core of Data" maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. (Four or five states have inadequate data for this kind of analysis.) The analysis reveals upwards of 4500 schools that have reading and/or math performance in the top third of their states AND are either high-poverty or high-minority or both. Those schools educate about two million kids and are found in cities, suburbs and rural areas. This report also NAMES the schools that meet its criteria (including, for example, 12 in the District of Columbia, 92 in Ohio). It allows for fascinating discoveries, such as the fact that, of 20 high poverty/minority/performing schools in Colorado, six are in middle-sized Pueblo while just two in the far larger city of Denver. It allowed me the depressing finding that, among the Ohio schools that are succeeding with poor and minority youngsters, only three are in Dayton where our foundation concentrates its resources. While it does not provide data on private schools, it does show which of the high-performing, high-poverty schools are charter schools (two of thirteen in Massachusetts, for example). Most important, it does indeed "dispel the myth" that schools full of disadvantaged kids are doomed to low performance. Have a look. It's a first-class contribution and a major new asset. Best of all, it includes an interactive database where you can set your own criteria for schools in the state of your choice and see what turns up. For that database, go to http://64.224.125.0/dtm/. For the Education Trust report itself (available on the web only), surf to www.edtrust.org/main/index.asp.
