Do ‘Good’ Schools Benefit All Students? The Answer Is Yes
The Concept of a “Good” School
The question of whether a “good” school is beneficial for all students or if some schools leave certain groups behind has been a central topic in education policy debates for many years. Federal regulations require states to not only evaluate a school’s overall performance but also ensure that no specific group of students is left behind. This policy stems from a long history where Black students, Hispanic students, and children with disabilities often received an inferior education compared to their white and non-disabled peers.
However, the approach of dividing students into different groups hasn’t delivered the transformative results that federal policymakers had hoped for. Over the past decade, for example, test scores have declined overall, particularly among low-performing students. These trends affect various racial and ethnic groups, as well as differences in income levels, students with and without disabilities, and native and non-native English speakers.
Challenges in Data Analysis
Publicly available data are not always suitable for examining the performance of lower-performing students within schools. To address this, a related question was explored: Are there schools that excel with one group of students while neglecting others? To investigate this, data from the state of Louisiana were used. Louisiana has shown good student performance in recent years and is one of the few states that calculates A-F grades both for overall schools and for individual student groups within those schools.
Income and Racial Disparities
The first area examined was family income. Could a Louisiana school achieve a high overall rating if its low-income students were not performing well? The answer was no. However, a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would involve comparing economically disadvantaged students with wealthier peers, which wasn’t possible with the publicly available Louisiana data.
Next, gaps between Black and white students were analyzed. The findings weren’t as clear as those related to income, but there was only one school that received an F for Black students and an A for white students. Additionally, only six schools earned a D for Black students and an A for white students. Unfortunately, there were no schools where low-income students performed better than their more affluent classmates, and only five schools where Black students outperformed their white peers.
Statewide Performance and Research Findings
Statewide, Black students performed worse than white students, and low-income students performed worse than wealthier students. However, these aggregate totals may suggest different problems than individual schools ignoring some of their students.
This analysis is based on one state and one year’s worth of data, but a 2023 research project from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research reached similar conclusions. The study looked at whether districts contributed to academic mobility—essentially, did students in some districts improve faster than their peers in other districts? After analyzing data for nearly 3 million students across seven states, the authors concluded that low-performing students experience the largest performance gains when attending districts where students generally excel.
Policy Implications
The lesson for state policymakers is not to stop collecting disaggregated data. That would be a mistake, as they would never know if within-school gaps emerged. Carefully constructed rules could flag the small subset of schools that do have gaps. For instance, a Louisiana school cannot receive an A grade overall if one of its subgroups is low-performing for two consecutive years. Virginia passed an even stronger rule requiring that any school with a low-performing subgroup automatically has its overall rating downgraded by one level.
More directly, a handful of states, including Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi, each have accountability systems that give schools points based on the academic growth of their lowest-performing students. Given the national trends where performance has fallen further among these children, more states should consider such measures.
Conclusion
While policymakers can take some comfort in knowing that good schools tend to be consistently good across student groups, the flip side is also true: Bad schools tend to be bad for everyone. State policymakers should focus more on district-level performance issues than within-school gaps.
Ultimately, for school leaders, the priority should be providing a consistently solid education.
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