Poverty, Reading Scores, and Resilient Schools

Countless studies have linked poverty and low socioeconomic status to low test scores, but some schools with children in poverty still do better than others. Resilient schools, as they are called, have better reading scores and higher poverty levels. New research in the July issue of American Behavioral Scientist looks carefully at factors that correlate with poverty, as well as school resiliency among 270,000 students in over 250 schools in Broward School District in Broward County, Florida. The author, Sara Ransdell, a professor in the Department of Health Science at Nova Southeastern University, had a twofold mission: tease out some of the conditions correlated with poverty to see how much they affect student performance, and target resilient schools and try to determine why they are outperforming their counterparts.

The results of the first part of study are almost disappointingly straightforward: Poverty was, by far, the biggest predictor of whether a child could read in the Broward School District at large.

Other factors, such as a child’s English Language Learner status or whether the child engaged in risky behavior, made “minor and often redundant contributions” to how a child performed in Ransdell’s analysis. After controlling for a myriad of different school- and child-related factors, including class sizes, teacher resources, and student ethnicity, the author was pointed back to the simplest explanation for why some children read better than others in school.

“The outcome is simple and yet difficult to address,” Ransdell wrote. “Poverty provides unique and substantial predictive power.”

In the resilient schools, poverty still plays a big role, but one that the school has managed to curb. The study identified 18 schools in the district as being resilient because both their poverty and reading levels were above the median. Eighteen schools is not a very big sample, but the patterns among these schools are interesting nonetheless: the resilient schools had higher per-pupil spending and lower student-to-teacher ratios than other schools. It’s unsurprising that spending plays a role: Florida currently ranks last in per-pupil expenditure among all 50 states.

What’s to be gleaned from this study of the Broward School District? Reading performance is more closely linked to poverty than many other factors, but there are ways to overcome poverty’s debilitating effects. In the case of Broward, it appears that schools that were better funded and had smaller class sizes were making an impact on their students despite poverty. This does not mean that throwing money at public schools will foster resiliency and the ability to break the poverty cycle for kids—every district has its own set of circumstances—but this study suggests that schools with the lowest levels of funding might benefit from having more.