Institutional Performance: Public Schools
Estimated 4th Grade Percent Proficient in Reading and Math, 2004-2005
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See notes at bottom of this page.
School districts in Minneapolis significantly outperform those in the rest of metropolitan Kansas City's peer group, with 42.5 percent of students testing proficient as measured by averaging reading and math proficiency levels. This is 6.5 percentage points higher than Denver, its nearest rival, though all of the remaining peers perform at approximately the same level, including Kansas City.
Still, with less than half of all students proficient in reading and math in any of the peer metros, it is hard to suggest any of them are doing an adequate job preparing their children to effectively participate in an economy where labor can be supplied from anywhere in the world.
Minneapolis's superior performance relative to the rest of the peer group is not so surprising, given that Minneapolis also spends over $500 more on instruction per student than its nearest competitor, once expenditures have been adjusted for the level student need.
What is perhaps surprising, given problems in both states with school funding, is that the nearest competitor is Kansas City. However, it appears the level of need is a greater factor in determining performance than spending, at least with respect to reading scores.
Percent Proficient in Reading vs.
Percent Disadvantaged and Adjusted Instructional Expenditures, 2004-2005
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There is a high degree of inverse correlation between the percentage of economically disadvantaged students and the percentage proficient in reading, with Minneapolis having the lowest percentage of disadvantaged students. Given this correlation, Kansas City might have been expected to perform slightly better, as it has a lower percentage of disadvantaged students than Salt Lake or Omaha but its reading scores were slightly worse.
More remarkable is that Salt Lake City's spending is significantly lower than any of the peer cities, but its percent proficient in reading is tied for third.
Reading Proficiency and School District Socioeconomics, 2004-2005
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across states as explained in notes below.
How school districts are structured to educate economically disadvantaged students has at least something to do with these results.
Salt Lake City has the highest percentage of students in non-poor districts (less than 40 percent poor). Minneapolis is ranked second. Somewhat surprisingly, the Kansas City area is ranked third. But Kansas City also has the highest proportion of students in poor school districts (greater than 60 percent poor).
And, while Minneapolis, Denver and Salt Lake have no students in very poor school districts (greater than 70 percent poor), Kansas City still has 7 percent, a figure exceeded only in St. Louis and Indianapolis.
Meanwhile, Austin, which has the highest proportion of economically disadvantaged students overall by far (42 percent, as shown in the prior graph, a full 12 percentage points higher than Kansas City's), educates 91 percent of its poor students in districts that are less than 60 percent poor, compared to 74 percent in Kansas City. Perhaps as a result, the proportion of its students achieving proficiency in reading (30 percent) is nearly that of Kansas City's (33 percent).
One clear result is that metropolitan Kansas City's disparity in student performance between non-disadvantaged disadvantaged districts is the worst among its peers. (Non-disadvantaged districts are defined here as districts where less than 40 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged.) Parity in district performance is best achieved in Austin.
Test Scores in Disadvantaged Districts
as a Percent of Non-Disadvantaged, 2004-2005
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Omaha and Salt Lake City did not provide district-level testing performance, so
the scores in disadvantaged vs. non-disadvantaged districts could not be calculated.
Not surprisingly, those metropolitan areas with the greatest disparity in test scores between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged districts also have the greatest disparity between the percentage of blacks living in concentrated poverty and the percentage of whites, while those with the least disparity in test scores had the least disparity between blacks and whites living in concentrated poverty.
Percent of Persons in Poverty Living in Concentrated Poverty (2000)
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The general correlation with income becomes readily apparent when examining the percent proficient in reading by district within the Kansas City metropolitan area. This makes it more difficult to measure the influence of schools relative to what is occurring in children's homes and communities.
Relative Reading Proficiency by School District, 2004-2005
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In the chart above, percent proficient by district was calculated as deviations from the state average on each side of the region. However, the state tests are normed differently, with 80 percent of students (approximately) testing as proficient in Kansas while only about 40 percent of students in Missouri test as proficient. This is true despite the fact that the NAEP results for both states are quite similar. Because a norm of 80 percent proficient means districts are limited into how much they can exceed the state average (20 point deviation maximum), the deviations were themselves normalized by MARC so that the best and worst school districts on each side were treated equally.
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Notes on test score adjustments for consistency across states:
The NAEP is the only standardized test of grade school, middle school and high school students conducted nationally. Unfortunately, the data is only reported by state.
For the charts above, the average amount each metro deviated from its corresponding state average was estimated as follows: Summary data on percent proficient, enrollment, and disadvantaged students was downloaded, by school district for each county in each peer metro, from Placematters.com, which collects data under the No Child Left Behind act. Data used is the latest available, which varies between 2004 and 2005.
From this data, a weighted average of percent proficient was calculated across school districts to estimate the average percent proficient in each state component of each metro. The state's average percent proficient was subtracted from this to create the state component's deviation from the state mean. This was then added to that state's NAEP measurement of percent proficient. Finally, the adjusted NAEP scores for each state component in a metro were averaged together using total enrollment as weights to produce the overall metropolitan estimate of percent proficient consistent with the NAEP.
It should be noted that, in general, this adjustment was small and the differences in scores across metros greatly paralleled the differences across states.