An Exploratory Study Comparing a Low Income Black Dominant Urban School to a Low Income White Dominant Urban School in Terms of School Quality

Abstract

Urban Schools are often judge on the perceived shortcomings of students’ academic skills and family social economic status. This image is judged more negatively when students are mainly Black students from low-income homes. One of the main sources of that judgement is the overall letter grade each school receives as part of state accountability systems. When urban schools have a preponderance of low income white students (LIW) with higher letter grades than urban schools with a preponderance of Black students from low income homes (LIB), the typical conclusion is that the LIW schools are “better” than the LIB schools. To see if this is validated in other areas of schooling, I selected four areas that it would be possible to use to “compare” in an exploratory fashion these two types of urban schools. Those four are: 1) teacher quality, 2) AP enrollment and completion data, 3) technology usage, and 4) graduation rates, for all of which data is available and/or can be collected. Thus, I will be exploring whether the school’s letter grade does distort the understanding or perception of quality for these two types of schools. The findings of the study indicated that the LIB urban high school was not equal or better than LIW urban high school. Even though there was growth in the four focus areas and in the state accountability grade for LIB urban high school, the LIW urban high school outperformed the LIB urban high school in all areas. This study also confirmed that the LIB urban high schools continue to have the less effective teachers in the classrooms, which leads to little to no change in educational quality.