EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Poverty = low performance? Maybe not

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/poverty-low-performance-maybe-not/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:

Much of the fallout from the A-F school grades focuses on the correlation between poverty and low performance. Many people have noted that schools with high percentages of schools with free and reduced price lunch students received Ds or Fs. 

Perhaps this indicates that those schools don’t have the resources to get the job done. Alternatively, the students in those schools may simply start out at such a disadvantage that academic proficiency is a distant goal. However, as many of you may remember from high school science classes: correlation does not imply causation. 

The best example of that are the 17 schools with 50 percent or more free and reduced price lunch students that received As. 

Terry Stoops wrote about this in the Carolina Journal. He noted that 150 schools with 50 percent or more free and reduced price lunch students got an A or B (here is his list). While he hasn’t been able to figure out why, he indicates that this subverts the traditional narrative of poverty equals poor performance in North Carolina schools. 

“Perhaps now that we’ve identified these superb schools, some enterprising researchers or doctoral students will identify the unique elements of their success and share their findings with schools that struggle to educate disadvantaged students adequately,” he said in his article. 

We are going to do just that. We plan to visit the 17 A schools, write profiles about them, and try to figure out just what they’re doing differently. 

Stoops has suspicions as to the reasons. 

“I suspect that each of these schools has outstanding teachers and administrators, supportive educational environments, and high expectations for all students,” he said. 

He may be right. We don’t know, but we’ll find out.