Vast poverty differences create unfair comparisons on Nation’s Report Card
“Consider the main poverty measure researchers use for schools: The percentage of students that qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. In Cleveland, 100 percent of students qualify for free lunch. That number is a little inflated, but only by a few percentage points. Some other cities like Dallas are over 90 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, with cities like Chicago, Milwaukee and Fresno also over 80 percent. Detroit is a little lower than expected on NAEP tests, in the 70s, because some private schools are included in some of the tests. But others have poverty rates that are so much lower.”