REPORTS

High-Need African-American and Latino Students
Doing Better in Suburban Districts
By Martine G. Guerrier

In a two-year study of 23 downstate suburban school districts, titled Checkerboard Schooling III, EPP found that these districts educate 7.03% of African-American and Latino students in New York State, as many as the combined big city school districts of Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo.

The objective of EPP’s report was to evaluate how districts with a majority of African-American and Latino students fared in funding and expenditures. The first Checkerboard report, authored by Dr. Joan Scheuer, found many high-need districts had not benefited from a formula created by Governor Cuomo called Extraordinary Needs Aid, because there were year-to-year caps on increases. The 1999 report helped to change this budget policy for high-need districts.

Good news
The latest study found that from the 1995-96 school year to the 2000- 01 school year, when the state economy was stronger, almost all majority African-American and Latino suburban districts received sizeable increases in state school aid. This helped bring their average expenditure levels to an average of $14, 837 per pupil for the highest-need group of districts and $14,358 for the rest, which brought them closer to the expenditure level of middle-income suburban districts with a majority of white students spending $15,009. New York City spent $11,474, $3,000 less per pupil than the majority African-American and Latino suburban public school districts.

Better elementary school
performance
The review of test performance data showed that these high-need suburban districts had managed to increase the numbers of 4th grade students on grade level and to decrease the numbers testing at Level 1 (no similar improvements occurred at for middle school students). When the issue of the Mayor’s grade retention policy emerged, EPP revisited the data on the performance of these 113,687 students on the state’s English Language Arts test.

For the purpose of analysis, the districts were divided into two groups. In the highest-poverty districts, where on average 74 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced price lunch, just 5.18 percent of their fourth grade students tested at Level 1 on the 2003 English Language Arts test. The modest-income group of districts, where 46 percent of students are receiving free and reduced price lunch, had on average 3.23 percent of their students testing at this level. In contrast, New York City had 8.9 percent of students testing at Level 1 on the 2003 ELA test.

In the high-need suburban dis-tricts, no school had more than 15 percent of students testing at Level 1, while New York City had 94 schools at this dismal performance level. Close to a third of students testing on Level 1 in the 2003 ELA test in New York City came from by these low performing schools.

The comparison of school test per-formance data raises several questions. Should the Chancellor’s District for low-performing schools have been abolished in the Children First reorganization? Will the new regional structure turn these schools around? If not, does the Zarb Commission recommendation to create a new state-level agency for low-per-forming schools make sense? Why did high-need suburban students perform so much better on the 4th grade tests?

2003 4th Grade ELA School Performance