2018 - Is There Systemic Meaningful Evidence of School Poverty Thresholds?

Attribution: Mickelson, Roslyn, A.
Researchers: Roslyn A. Mickelson
University Affiliation: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Email: RoslynMickelson@uncc.edu
Research Question:
This research brief summarizes recent research about school SES composition effects on educational outcomes, with a focus on whether this enormous cross-disciplinary body of research supports claims that school poverty “thresholds” or “tipping points” exist. In other words, is there evidence of certain levels of school poverty concentrations above and below which students’ outcomes are affected?
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: National Coalition on School Diversity
Journal Entry: Research Brief 14
Year: 2018
Findings:

-The author review of the literature about the relationships among SES and educational outcomes revealed surprisingly few SES threshold studies relative to the enormous corpus of research on SES composition effects.
– With few exceptions, the very small number of U.S. studies that report thresholds effects typically were conducted by a school district’s internal staff using cross-sectional data (only one year) for a subpopulation of district’s students.
-Conclusions reached in these studies arguably apply only to the students in the district who took part in the study, in the year in which the data were collected.
-The studies described in this report are not an empirical foundation upon which general educational policy regarding SES thresholds can be reliably or validly based.
– Educational decision makers should focus on reducing concentrations of school-level poverty to as low a level as is feasible given the available demographic mix, and avoid policies based on the unsupported notion that there are poverty thresholds above and below which student achievement levels can be predicted.
– There is not yet a body of systematic, reliable, and valid evidence that school poverty thresholds exist, and that they influence student achievement outcomes.

Scholarship Types: Journal Article Reporting Review of LiteratureKeywords: AchievementEducationPovertySchool SES CompositionSESRegions: NationalMethodologies: QualitativeResearch Designs: Literature ReviewAnalysis Methods: Literature Review Sampling Frame:Previous Published Documents
Sampling Types: Non-Random - PurposiveAnalysis Units: DocumentData Types: Qualitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:

-The document briefly reviews the social and behavioral science research on school-level SES effects in general and then reviews some of the most prominent threshold studies with the goal of identifying strengths or weaknesses of their research designs and findings, and if there are any broader conclusions we can draw
from these reports based on the evidence they provide.
– Some of the included studies are:
Sirin, 2005
White, 1982
Kahlenberg, 2001, 2012a, 2012b
Palardy & Rumberger, 2005
Palardy, 2013
Perry & McConney, 2010
van Ewijk & Sleegers, 2010
Reardon & Owens, 2014
Reardon, 2016
Bohrnstedt, Kitmitto, Ogut, Sherman, & Chan, 2015
Kahlenberg, 2001
Orland, 1990
Anderson, Hollinger, & Conaty, 1992
Rusk, 1998
Palardy, 2008
Parcel & Taylor, 2015
Banks, 2001
Lauen & Gaddis, 2015
Schwartz, 2010
Fairfax County, 2013

Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts