High-poverty Districts Research Articles

Have You Heard? Newsworthy items from the field

The Great Recess Framework helps schools evaluate the safety of their playgrounds and the social benefits of the activities that take place there. A guide from the Arts Education Partnership and the National Association of Elementary School Principals provides suggestions for increasing arts education. Newly released data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that, nationwide, schools from high-poverty districts receive less funding than those in wealthier districts. The Principal Supervisor Initiative aims to transform the work of principal supervisors.

The right to taste: Conceptualizing the nourishing potential of school lunch

ABSTRACTThe National School Lunch Program (NLSP) draws on federal poverty guidelines to distribute free, reduced, and full price meals to students throughout the United States. The NSLP aims to provide nutritious meals to students in need, and in 2014, the Community Eligibility Provision expanded food entitlements, allowing high poverty districts to serve all meals free. This study analyzes pilot ethnographic research conducted in an urban elementary school and draws on three dimensions of nourishment to consider the impact of school meals. Failure to understand how the filling, invigorating, and gratifying dimensions of nourishment engage and contradict one another diminishes the overall impact of school food entitlements. Drawing on the NSLP “offer vs serve” model, this article presents the right to taste as a conceptual platform for obtaining all dimensions of nourishment.

Relating psychological and social factors to academic performance: A longitudinal investigation of high-poverty middle school students

We investigated the relations between middle school students' psychological factors (academic commitment and emotional control), social perceptions (family involvement and school climate), and academic performance over time. Gender differences in these relations were also examined. Based on a two-year longitudinal data set of 942 middle-school students from a high-poverty district in the United States, we found that all four factors measured in 6th grade were predictive of GPA at the end of the 7th grade above and beyond gender, race, and home intellectual materials. Among these factors, emotional control had the strongest relation with GPA, and the importance of family involvement increased over time, especially for female students. The results also revealed the indirect effects of the social factors on GPA through the psychological factors, and mostly through emotional control. These findings highlight the complex relation between the social-emotional factors and academic outcomes in early adolescence.

The Urban Teaching Cohort: pre-service training to support mental health in urban schools

AbstractSupporting students’ mental health needs is critical in high-poverty urban school districts where many students are at risk for mental health problems. Although teacher–student relationships are at the core of student mental health promotion in the classroom, many teacher preparation programmes do not adequately prepare pre-service teachers entering into urban teaching for the realities of urban teaching. Miami University’s Urban Teaching Cohort (UTC) is an innovative, community-based approach to preparing pre-service teachers for work in the field of urban teacher preparation. In this paper, we review research on the challenges impacting the mental health of urban youth, describe how these challenges connect to the work of urban teachers and discuss how urban teacher preparation can help teachers better support students’ mental health. We discuss the elements of the UTC programme and how this preparation approach can help teachers build relationships with urban students and their families, as wel...

Investigating Technology-Enhanced Teacher Professional Development in Rural, High-Poverty Middle Schools

This 3-year, mixed-methods study investigated the effects of teacher technology-enhanced professional development (TPD) on 20 teachers’ beliefs and practices. Teachers in two middle schools located in neighboring rural, high-poverty districts in the southeastern United States participated in reform-based lessons and learned how to integrate technologies into their teaching over three summers and throughout the school year. Mathematics and science assessment scores for 2,321 students both with and without TPD teachers were analyzed over the 3 years of teacher TPD. Teachers’ reform-based teaching beliefs and their comfort using new technologies increased significantly, and all of the teachers integrated the use of technologies into their instruction. Although some TPD teachers used technology in ways that transformed their roles and classroom practices, the majority of the teachers adopted technology in ways that improved efficiency and effectiveness. African American students who had more TPD teachers over more years experienced significant gains on end-of-grade mathematics and science tests. Findings suggest that if teachers integrate technology into their instruction, large-scale changes in teachers’ practices are not necessary to enhance students’ learning, particularly for African American students.

Challenging Boundaries, Changing Fate? Metropolitan Inequality and the Legacy of Milliken

Background This article examines the contemporary implications of the Milliken v. Bradley (1974) decision for educational inequality between school districts in U.S. metropolitan areas. We focus upon four metropolitan areas that were highly segregated in the 1970s but which met different fates in court: We first examine Detroit and Philadelphia, where plaintiffs sought but ultimately failed to obtain a metropolitan-wide desegregation ruling. We then examine St. Louis, where a court imposed a metropolitan desegregation remedy. We finally include Jefferson County, where the court order resulted in a merger of city and suburban schools. Objective Through this comparative analysis we seek to tease out the effects of the ruling on patterns of inequity between urban and suburban school districts over time. We specifically examine how districts within these metro areas differed over time in terms of patterns of school segregation, fiscal resources, and academic performance. Research Design We employed qualitative case study methodology. We purposively selected three case study districts within each of the four metro areas (total of 12 school districts) based on their contextual status in 1970, i.e., whether they were in each of these three categories: urban, segregated suburban, or affluent suburban. We compared them along three dimensions: patterns of segregation, academic outcomes, and fiscal resources. Conclusions We found that the segregated and high poverty districts in the three metro areas where courts left districts intact (Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis) have been, since Milliken, increasingly hemmed in by their boundaries: struggling with growing concentrations of need, low resources to meet those needs, and as a result falling into fiscal and academic decline. In contrast, the maintenance of district boundaries by the courts has allowed the affluent suburbs in these contexts, over time, to benefit from a number of policies and practices that allowed them to accrue and protect advantage through exclusionary zoning policies and housing discrimination. Together, these policies have promoted and protected the affluence and advantage in each of these contexts, which has in turn attracted investment and allowed these districts to maintain strong financial standing over time. Our study suggests that socially constructed political boundaries, like school district boundary lines, by carving up political geography along the lines of race and class, can take on an active role in the reproduction of inequality.

The Influence of Parent Social Networks on Parent Perceptions and Motivation for Involvement

Despite reform efforts to involve parents, parent–school relationships in urban districts are rare. This qualitative study used a constructivist grounded theory approach to gain an understanding of how parent social networks, specifically relationships with other parents in the school, influence parent perceptions of their role in the educational process and their efficacy to fulfill perceived roles. Findings suggest that parents have differing perceptions about their role and differences in efficacy for involvement; however, relationships with other parents are important resources for role construction and efficacy, and may serve to lessen the disconnect between parents and schools in high-poverty districts.

Helping ELLs Meet Standards in English Language Arts and Science: An Intervention Focused on Academic Vocabulary

The Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards require students to understand and produce academic language that appears in informational text. Vocabulary is a critical domain of academic language, but English language learners (ELLs) come to the English Language Arts classroom with more limited English vocabulary than their English-proficient peers. This study compared 2 methods of vocabulary instruction: extended vocabulary instruction and embedded vocabulary instruction. Teachers implemented both approaches in the context of interactive shared reading, in which teachers and students read and discussed informational text. A total of 30 teachers in 18 schools and 509 third- and fourth-grade Spanish-speaking ELLs in a large, high-poverty district in the southwestern United States participated. Findings indicate that although extended instruction was the more effective approach, embedded instruction also helped ELLs acquire general academic and domain-specific vocabulary—an important finding, given that embedded instruction requires considerably less instructional time.

School and District-Level Characteristics Associated With Participation in the After-School Snack Component of the National School Lunch Program

Providing children with nutritious after-school snacks as part of an after-school enrichment program can promote healthy diets and improve food security of at-risk children. However, in 2010 only 27% of schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) also offered the after-school snack component of the program, making it available to only a minority of American schoolchildren. We investigate school and district-level characteristics associated with the likelihood of a school offering the program. Schools more likely to offer the program serve mainly low-income students and are located in urban, high-poverty districts. Elementary schools are the most likely to offer the program and high schools the least likely. Further investigation of the factors influencing availability of after-school snacks would assist child nutrition program staff, policymakers, and child nutrition advocates to assess needs and target efforts to encourage schools to offer NSLP snacks.

Participatory assessment of animal health and husbandry practices in smallholder pig production systems in three high poverty districts in Uganda

While animal health constraints have been identified as a major limiting factor in smallholder pig production in Uganda, researchers and policy makers lack information on the relative incidence of diseases and their impacts on pig production. This study aimed to assess animal health and management practices, constraints and opportunities for intervention in smallholder pig value chains in three high poverty districts of Uganda. Semi-qualitative interview checklists through Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were administered to 340 pig farmers in 35 villages in Masaka, Kamuli and Mukono districts. Quantitative data was obtained during the exercise through group consensus. Results of FGDs were further triangulated with secondary data and information obtained from key informant interviews. Findings show that pig keeping systems are dominated by tethering and scavenging in rural areas. In peri-urban and urban areas, intensive production systems are more practiced, with pigs confined in pens. The main constraints identified by farmers include high disease burden such as African swine fever (ASF) and parasites, poor housing and feeding practices, poor veterinary services, ineffective drugs and a general lack of knowledge on piggery management. According to farmers, ASF is the primary cause of pig mortality with epidemics occurring mainly during the dry season. Worms and ectoparasites namely; mange, lice and flies are endemic leading to stunted growth which reduces the market value of pigs. Diarrhoea and malnutrition are common in piglets. Ninety-three percent of farmers say they practice deworming, 37% practice ectoparasite spraying and 77% castrate their boars. Indigenous curative treatments include the application of human urine and concoctions of local herbs for ASF control and use of old engine oil or tobacco extracts to control ectoparasites. There is a need for better technical services to assist farmers with these problems.

The Development of the STEM Career Interest Survey (STEM-CIS)

Internationally, efforts to increase student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers have been on the rise. It is often the goal of such efforts that increased interest in STEM careers should stimulate economic growth and enhance innovation. Scientific and educational organizations recommend that efforts to interest students in STEM majors and careers begin at the middle school level, a time when students are developing their own interests and recognizing their academic strengths. These factors have led scholars to call for instruments that effectively measure interest in STEM classes and careers, particularly for middle school students. In response, we leveraged the social cognitive career theory to develop a survey with subscales in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In this manuscript, we detail the six stages of development of the STEM Career Interest Survey. To investigate the instrument's reliability and psychometric properties, we administered this 44-item survey to over 1,000 middle school students (grades 6–8) who primarily were in rural, high-poverty districts in the southeastern USA. Confirmatory factor analyses indicate that the STEM-CIS is a strong, single factor instrument and also has four strong, discipline-specific subscales, which allow for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subscales to be administered separately or in combination. This instrument should prove helpful in research, evaluation, and professional development to measure STEM career interest in secondary level students.

Doing More With Less

Teacher retention is of critical concern in rural and high-poverty districts. This case study describes one school’s challenges following the district’s budget cuts that eliminated funding for schools’ mentor programs. The mentor coordinator at this elementary school faces several dilemmas as she attempts to maintain high-quality support for the beginning teachers. Complicating the school’s efforts are the increasing demands made of the veteran staff as they try to do more with less in several areas.

General Music and Children Living in Poverty

A review of recent writing makes the case that children living in poverty (urban, rural, or other) are more in jeopardy now than ever. As teachers attest and research asserts, poverty affects children in profound, complicated, and lasting ways. However, the general music program is uniquely positioned to meet children’s needs, especially those living in poverty. This discussion will consider several important questions: First, what are the complexities that confront children living in poverty? Next, how can culturally responsive pedagogy guide us to respectful approaches for general music educators working with these populations? And finally, how can music education organizations help remove potential roadblocks to implementing strong music programs in high-poverty districts?

Abbott and Bacon Districts: Education Finances During the Great Recession

In the State of New Jersey, any child between the age of five and eighteen has the constitutional right to a thorough and efficient education. The State of New Jersey also has one of the country’s most rigid policies regarding a balanced budget come fiscal end. When state and local revenues took a big hit in the most recent recession, officials had to make tough decisions about education spending. This paper exploits rich panel data and trend-shift analysis to analyze how school finances in the Abbott and Bacon School Districts, as well as the high-poverty districts in general, were affected during the Great Recession and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) federal stimulus period. For these groups of districts, the debate over the meaning of thorough and efficient has become a perennial courtroom discussion. Our analysis shows downward shifts in revenue and expenditure per pupil during the post-recession era in all three groups of districts. However, the Abbott Districts showed the sharpest declines in both revenue and expenditure relative to preexisting trends. Of importance, the Abbott Districts were the only group in our analysis to show statistically significant negative shifts in instructional expenditure (the expenditure category most closely related to student learning), even with the federal stimulus. Declines in noninstructional categories were also the most prominent in the Abbott Districts. With comparably less declines in state and federal aid, the Bacon Districts maintained spending across the board at higher levels than the other groups. Given the unique role of the Abbott and Bacon Districts in the history of New Jersey education policy, the findings of this paper contribute valuable insight regarding the experience of these high-poverty districts during recessions.

Minds and Hearts: Using Jeannette Walls’s Memoir, The Glass Castle, to Teach Emotional Intelligence

A memoir of a dysfunctional childhood inspires students in a high-poverty district to develop strength, empathy, and hope.

Childhood Obesity, Academic Achievement, and School Expenditures

The authors examine whether childhood obesity affects student achievement and whether these effects differ by family income level. Although childhood obesity is a national concern, the issue is even more urgent in West Virginia where obesity rates for fifth graders are near 30 percent. Using a 2003-2007 panel of school district data, the authors find evidence that obesity negatively affects reading proficiency in high poverty districts, but obesity rates have little effect in lower poverty districts. The authors estimate that it would require a substantial increase in instructional education spending to offset the obesity effects on academic achievement in high poverty districts.

Disparities in Work Conditions Among Early Career Special Educators in High- and Low-Poverty Districts

The authors used teacher data from the Study of Personnel Needs in Special Education to compare the district and school supports, work manageability, professional development, and induction of early career special educators in high- and low-poverty districts. Teachers in high-poverty districts reported less desirable work conditions than their counterparts in more affluent districts. When compared to teachers in low-poverty districts, those in less affluent districts viewed their principals and colleagues as less supportive, perceived less involvement in school decisions, reported having fewer materials, and indicated higher and more diverse caseloads. By contrast, the two teacher groups reported similar professional development and induction opportunities.

Responsible to the Kids: The Goals and Struggles of Urban High School Teachers

For this study, 40 teachers at four admired public urban high schools participated in interviews about the responsibilities, goals, and challenges they face as they try to attend to students' needs in the midst of pressures from high stakes testing and high academic standards. Common themes from their responses included a deep and profound responsibility to the “kids” who enter their classrooms; ongoing efforts to negotiate the academic and personal goals they have for each student; frustration and dismay that their “juggling act” is not recognized in the wider society; and feelings of burnout when they become overwhelmed by their efforts to balance competing demands. How teachers negotiate these tensions is explored. Suggestions are made for how to enhance the sustainability of good teaching in public education, especially in areas of high student need, such as high-poverty urban districts.

The Goals of Education

NO CHILD Left Behind (NCLB) holds all elementary schools, regardless of student characteristics, accountable for achieving proficient student scores in reading and math. By demanding that schools report achievement for racial, ethnic, and economic subgroups, the accountability system aims to shine a light on schools that children behind. At first glance, this approach seems reasonable. But few who debate the details of implementation have considered how this accountability system has begun to shift how we think about what schools should do. By basing sanctions solely on math and reading scores, the law creates incentives to limit--or in some cases to eliminate entirely--time spent on other important curricular objectives. This reorientation of instruction disproportionately affects low-income and minority children, so achievement gaps may actually widen in areas for which schools are not now being held accountable. The shift in curricular coverage is also at odds with the consensus about the goals of public education to which Americans historically have subscribed. More surprisingly, it is also starkly at odds with the apparent intentions of school board members and state legislators, who are responsible for implementing the policy, and with the intentions of the public whom these leaders represent. We will discuss the evidence with regard to these intentions later in this article. For now, let us begin by documenting the goal displacement stimulated by NCLB. The federal government's periodic national survey of teachers demonstrates the curricular shifts. In 1991, teachers in grades 1 to 4 spent an average of 33% of their classroom instructional time on reading. By 2004, reading was consuming 36% of instructional time. For math, average weekly time went from 15% to 17%. Meanwhile, time for social studies and science decreased. Since 1991, instructional time spent on social studies went from 9% to 8%, and time spent on science went from 8% to 7%. (1) These seemingly small average changes mask a disproportionate impact on the most disadvantaged students. The Council for Basic Education surveyed school principals in several states in the fall of 2003 and found that principals in schools with high proportions of minorities were more likely to have reduced time for history, civics, geography, the arts, and foreign languages so that they could devote more time to math and reading. In New York, for example, twice as many principals in high-minority schools reported such curricular shifts as did principals in mostly white schools. In high-minority elementary schools, 38% of principals reported decreasing the time devoted to social studies (usually meaning history), but in low-minority schools only 17% reported decreasing such time. (2) A 2005 survey by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) found that 97% of high-poverty districts had new minimum-time requirements for reading, while only 55% of low-poverty districts had them. (3) The CEP had previously found that, where districts had adopted such minimum-time policies, about half had reduced social studies, 43% had reduced art and music, and 27% had reduced physical education. (4) Thus, although NCLB aims to narrow the achievement gap in math and reading, its unintended consequence is to widen the gap in other curricular areas. This is how one former teacher describes her changed classroom activities: From my experience of being an elementary school teacher at a low- performing urban school in Los Angeles, I can say that the pressure became so intense that we had to show how every single lesson we taught connected to a standard that was going to be tested. This meant that art, music, and even science and social studies were not a priority and were hardly ever taught. We were forced to spend ninety percent of the instructional time on reading and math. This made teaching boring for me and was a huge part of why I decided to leave the profession. …

NCLB's Supplemental Educational Services: Is This What Our Students Need?

SUPPLEMENTAL educational services, as legislated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, must be made available to students in low-performing Title I schools. Although we have just completed the fourth year since implementation began, a handful of evaluations are beginning to present a few common themes. The federal out-of-school tutoring program features free-market strategies promoted by the Bush Administration: parental choice, money following individual students, and the privatization of educational delivery. Created in response to low standardized-test scores, the requirement for supplemental educational services also reflects NCLB's lack of interest in the wider goals of public schools or students' school experiences. Just as NCLB has forced high-poverty schools to narrow their academic offerings to ensure that students make adequate yearly progress in English and math, (1) the two subjects currently tested, the supplemental services provision extends this narrowed educational agenda into students' out-of-school hours. After-school programs had already begun a rapid expansion before NCLB, partly as a result of President Clinton's 21st Century Community Learning Centers and partly because of concerns about rising numbers of latchkey children and increasing crime rates in the hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. There was also growing awareness that the poor were concentrated in inner cities and that regular classroom hours were too few to impart the academic, developmental, and social skills necessary to help many low-income children move out of poverty. At the upper ends of the range of income and wealth, competition for college entrance was fueling a thriving tutoring industry on the lookout for new markets. With about $2.6 billion of the $13 billion in Title I funds potentially usable for supplemental services, the new federal program was a boon to the private tutoring industry and to nonprofits already providing tutoring. As with vouchers, which were on the conservative agenda when supplemental services emerged as a compromise initiative, money for supplemental services follows the student. That is, a Title I school designated in need of improvement must inform its students of available tutoring and reimburse the supplemental services provider that each student chooses. (2) School spending for tutoring varies widely, depending on a school's Title I allotment, the number of students using supplemental services, and providers' hourly rates. However, costs for supplemental services have risen steadily over the past four years, reaching an average of more than $1,400 per student in 2004, which is two to three times the cost of Title I comprehensive schoolwide programs. (3) Given the current 20% cap on the use of Title I funds for supplemental services and choice-related transportation, districts estimate that they can serve about a fifth of all eligible children with available Title I funds, though urban districts estimate that they can pay for only 18%. (4) The percentage is still lower in large, high-poverty districts: Los Angeles, for instance, can serve 16% of those eligible with existing Title I funds. (5) So far, however, enrollment in supplemental services nationwide remains low. According to the most recent estimate by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), only 233,000 or 11% of the two million eligible students are enrolled nationwide. (6) Moreover, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that 20% of districts required to offer supplemental services had no students enrolled. The majority of these were rural or had fewer than 2,500 students. (7) In the 299 districts surveyed by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) in 2005-06, 20% of eligible students took advantage of supplemental services. However, extremely low percentages of eligible students enrolling in supplemental services have been reported in Houston (3%) and Philadelphia (5%). (8) In Los Angeles, 32,500 or 11% of all eligible students are enrolled in supplemental services, but 318,000 students participate in various academic intervention programs before or after school or on Saturdays. …