1) While there are no drastic differences between achievement gains as a result of school sector classification (save for instances in which public school students are predicted to perform better than their Catholic school counterparts at low levels of school poverty), school poverty contributes to differences in achievement gains. For the interaction effect between school poverty and school sector, eighth graders attending public schools with no poverty attain the highest reading scores. On the flip side, eighth grades students attending public schools where all students qualify for free or reduced lunch have the lowest scores.
2) The effects of poverty are not as clear in Catholic schools. In a surprising result, eighth grades students in Catholic schools with more than 90% poverty not only have higher predicted test scores than their public school counterparts (also at schools with more than 90% poverty), but they also have higher predicted test scores than students in Catholic schools were 65-90% of students in poverty.