The Impact of School SES on Student Achievement: Evidence From U.S. Statewide Achievement Data

Abstract

After the U.S. Supreme Court restricted the use of race in assigning students to schools, there was a surge in advocacy of school integration based on student socioeconomic status (SES). Benefits of socioeconomic integration have been supported by various studies finding significant effects of school SES on achievement after controlling for individual student SES. This article investigates school SES effects using statewide longitudinal achievement data from several U.S. states. School SES effects nearly vanish after controlling for a student's prior achievement or, alternatively, controlling for stable differences among students using fixed effects models. The article concludes that large school SES effects often found in cross-sectional studies are artifacts of aggregation and are not a sound basis for SES-based school integration policies.

Critiques of socio-economic school compositional effects: are they valid?

“…Marks and colleagues (Armor et al, 2018;Marks, 2010Marks, , 2015Marks, , 2017 have critiqued school compositional research for ecological fallacies and lack of control for prior achievement but have rarely engaged with specific studies. The ecological fallacy is when a relationship observed at the group level is mistakenly used to describe the effect of group membership on individuals (Robinson, 1950).…”

“…Marks and colleagues (Armor et al, 2018;Marks 2015Marks , 2017 have also argued that many school compositional studies have overestimated SEC effects by not controlling for prior achievement. This criticism has not considered the differing aims of longitudinal and cross-sectional compositional research.…”

“…Marks has argued that education policymakers and researchers have had an unwarranted focus on SES given that genetic and cognitive differences, not SES, are the dominant causes of diversity of student outcomes (Marks, 2017). This article will respond to Marks and colleagues' (Armor et al, 2018;Marks, 2010Marks, , 2015Marks, , 2017 critiques of the veracity of SEC effects in three sections. Firstly, we will address their arguments that prior school compositional research has suffered from ecological fallacies and lack of control of prior achievement.…”

Science teaching practices in Indonesian secondary schools: A portrait of educational quality and equity based on PISA 2015

“…At the school/collective level, at least two mechanisms have been proposed to explain why high SES schools tend to perform better than lower SES ones (Armor, Marks, & Malatinszky, 2018;van Ewijk & Sleegers, 2010). The first mechanism operates through school or institutional factors.…”

The Problems with Economic Integration and Controlled Choice

“…12 Finally, a new study published in a leading education policy journal analyzed student test scores and socioeconomic status from three statewide databases and found that school economic integration had virtually no effect on math or reading scores once individual socioeconomic status was taken into account. 13 To illustrate these various arguments, we shall examine several case studies of large school districts that adopted socioeconomic integration plans, most of which used controlled-choice methods. These districts are Wake County, North Carolina; Jefferson County, Kentucky; Lee, Manatee, and St. Lucie counties, Florida; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.…”