Money ain't a thing.

Rick Green, blogger for the Hartford Courant, has two posts about the highest performing schools across all state goals. The first is a focused on the highest achieving high schools. After hearing from disgruntled readers pointing out that his first list was simply a look at the wealthiest schools, he posted the fifteen highest performing school districts with low-income students across all state goals. I thought I'd provide a little but more information:

Rick Green, blogger for the Hartford Courant, has two posts about the highest performing schools across all state goals. The first is a focused on the highest achieving high schools. After hearing from disgruntled readers pointing out that his first list was simply a look at the wealthiest schools, he posted the fifteen highest performing school districts with low-income students across all state goals. I thought I'd provide a little but more information. Here are the high achivers and poverty rate:


Here are the highest performing districts for their low-income students as well as the poverty rate for those towns:

What I notice about the two graphs is that, other than the Elm City College Preparatory District (a charter school), the poverty rates of the towns are relatively similar. This similarity might suggest that the low-income students attending classes with middle-class students has a positive effect on their education because their numbers are so few.

I decided to test this theory by looking up the lowest performing high schools and the town poverty rates. Five of the schools are located in Hartford and two are located in Bridgeport. They are a mix of magnet, charter, and regular public schools. Collaborative Alternative Magnet is located in New Haven County, but the "town" doesn't exist in the data I'm looking at:

All of the lowest performing schools, with the exception of Stamford Academy and Briggs High School, reside in concentrated areas of poverty. What does exactly does this data really mean? I'm not sure. But I do find the data interesting. The low performing school I work at, which falls into the bottom 15% of Connecticut schools carries the weight of a town poverty rate of nearly 16%.

From all the data, one school district intrigues me the most--Elm City College Preparatory. This charter school is part of the Achievement First network. That their two schools are finding success with low-income students means they are doing something right. Critics would scream "creaming," but that rant is getting tired.

The other intersting debate which grows out of the data is funding. Some attribute the success of the first list to income only. Some attribute the failure of the latter list to a lack of income only. But, in 2007-2008, Bridgeport Public Schools spent $11,132 per-pupil. Avon Public Schools, one of the top ten, spent $10,161. My school district spends just over $12,000.

In the end, I'm not smart enough to synthesize a great deal from all of these numbers. But there is one conclusion I have come to: there is no one size fits all solution. And ultimately, we should be willing to examine multiple methods and not simply disregard them because they don't fit our political or social viewpoints.