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Is a 鈥済ood鈥� school good for everyone, or do some schools leave students behind?  

This question has been at the heart of education policy debates for decades. Federal law requires states to not only look at a school鈥檚 overall results, but to make sure that no group of students is 鈥渓eft behind.鈥� This policy is grounded in a long history of schools giving Black students, Hispanic students and children with disabilities an education that was inferior to that offered to white and non-disabled peers.

But subdividing students in this way hasn’t proven as transformative as federal policymakers might have wished. Over the last decade, for example, scores have been declining overall, but especially for low-performing students. Those trends cross all racial and ethnic groups and apply to differences across income levels, for students with and without disabilities, and for native and non-native English speakers. 

Unfortunately, publicly available data are not well suited to looking specifically at the performance of lower-performing students within schools, so I asked a related one: Are there schools that are doing an excellent job with one group of students while neglecting others? 

To unpack this question, I turned to data from the state of Louisiana. Not only have students there done quite well in recent years, Louisiana is also one of the few states that calculates A-F grades both for overall schools and for individual student groups within those schools.

I started by looking at family income. Could a Louisiana school could somehow earn a high overall rating if its low-income students were not doing well?

The answer is no.

Of course, a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would compare economically disadvantaged students with wealthier peers, not the overall student body. That wasn鈥檛 possible with the publicly available Louisiana data.

Next, I looked at gaps between Black and white kids. The story wasn’t quite as clear as the one around income, but there was only one school that got an F for Black students and an A for white students, and just six schools earned a D for Black students and an A for white students.

Sadly, there were no schools where low-income students earned a higher grade than their more affluent classmates, and only five schools where the Black student group earned a higher grade than their white peers. Statewide, Black students performed worse than white students and low-income students performed worse than wealthier students. But those aggregate totals may suggest different problems than individual schools ignoring some of their students.

Now, this is just one state and one year鈥檚 worth of data, but from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research came to similar conclusions. It looked at whether districts contributed to academic mobility 鈥� essentially, did students in some districts improve faster than their peers in other districts. After looking at data for nearly 3 million students across seven states, the authors concluded that, 鈥渓ow-performing students experience the largest performance gains when attending districts where students generally excel.鈥�

The lesson for state policymakers is not that they should just trust these generalities and stop collecting disaggregated data. That would be a mistake, since they would never know if within-school gaps did emerge.

Moreover, carefully constructed rules could flag the small subset of schools that do have gaps. For instance, a Louisiana school cannot receive an A grade overall if one of its subgroups is low-performing for two consecutive years. (That caught one school last year with a low-performing English learner subgroup.) Virginia passed an even stronger last year requiring that any school with a low-performing subgroup automatically will have its overall rating downgraded by one level. These are useful back-end checks.

More directly, a handful of states, including Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, each have accountability systems that give schools points based on the academic growth of their lowest-performing students. Given the national trends where performance has fallen further among these children, more states should consider such measures.

While policymakers can take some heart in knowing that good schools tend to be consistently good across student groups, the flip side is also true: Bad schools tend to be bad for everyone, and state policymakers should focus more on district-level performance issues than within-school gaps.

Ultimately, for school leaders, the priority should be providing a consistently solid education.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman worked as a consultant for the Virginia Department of Education on the accountability regulations mentioned in the piece. 

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