News Flash! School performance linked to parents income!

When I ran for Mayor in 1989- I talked about ending busing based on its trading of racial segregation for economic segregation.

Mike Turner used to make fun of me- saying I should be running for School Board instead- and that the Mayor and Commission had no power over the schools.

Less than 7 years later- he tried to take the credit for ending school busing.

The fact is- our region is segregated by income and by race- and of the two- the Dayton Daily News just discovered today- that there is a direct link between household income and school test scores. Imagine that.

Here is a link to the article “Data suggest income predicts school test score results.” 

Here is the Dayton Daily News way of saying what I was saying many years ago:

Just as educators say household wealth, or lack of it, can reliably help or handicap a student’s school success, median income in a community powerfully predicts standardized test success for school districts.

To determine just how strongly test scores and income are connected, the Dayton Daily News compared the statistical relationship between 2004 median income from tax returns with just released “performance index scores,” a state measure of test performance last school year across all tested grades, for all 610 Ohio school districts. The correlation was robust — more than twice what researchers expect for a strong connection.

When the same calculation was run for other factors on Ohio’s state report card — race, teacher pay, teacher training and school district spending and size — the connection was less than half as strong as for income.

An identical analysis for just the 82 Dayton-area districts gave the same result — income was by far the strongest predictor of test success.

Hmmm, does this mean we can file a lawsuit forcing Oakwood to accept poor Dayton students?

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