Rochester’s Broken School System Kent Gardner argues forcefully in the Rochester Beacon that Rochester’s school system is broken and in need of radical change. Gardner’s post highlights the efforts of a local organization, ROC the Future, to bring about reform of the city’s school system. Gardner is correct – students in the city’s schools do poorly compared to others […]
Poverty in Upstate Metropolitan Areas – Characteristics and Change: 1999-2013 A paper, based, in part, on data previously presented on this blog site. This paper examines the incidence of poverty in upstate New York cities, compared to the surrounding suburbs. The data shows that while residents of upstate suburbs enjoy incomes that are substantially higher than the national average, and poverty rates that are substantially […]
More on Race, Income and Student Achievement A few months ago, I wrote about the link between economic disadvantage and poor student performance. I looked at the performance of students on the State’s annual student assessment for grades 3 to 8, and found that the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in schools and school districts accounted for about three quarters of the […]
Income Divisions in Upstate Metropolitan Neighborhoods In earlier posts, I wrote about income and racial separation between the residents of upstate cities and suburbs. The data showed that residents of upstate cities saw sharp increases in poverty levels between 2000 and 2013, while city populations became increasingly diverse, primarily because of the loss of white residents. The data also showed that […]
Income Inequality and Minority Group Status in Upstate Metropolitan Areas In an earlier post, I pointed out that residents of upstate metropolitan areas actually have incomes that are somewhat higher than the average for other cities in the so called “rust belt” – cities located in the old manufacturing regions of the Northeast and Midwest. But, the largest upstate cities – Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse […]
Single Parents and Child and Family Poverty in Upstate Cities In an earlier post, I showed that very high percentages of people with children under 18 lived in poverty in upstate cities, and that the percentage increased significantly between 1999 and 2013. While a few rust belt cities, like Flint and Detroit, Michigan had higher levels of poverty among people with children, poverty in cities […]
Can Charter Schools break the Poverty-Poor Student Performance Link? In an earlier post, I argued that school based solutions to the problem of the poor performance of students in central city schools were not likely to succeed because they ignored the impact of the concentration of disadvantaged students on student achievement. The data showed that 79% of the variation in performance in school performance […]
New York’s “Failing Schools” – The Wrong Diagnosis and a Misguided Solution For the past several years, Governor Cuomo’s office has issued a report, “The State of New York’s Failing Schools.” The 2015 report contends that “Despite the fact that districts with failing schools receive more state funding than other districts, these schools are delivering unacceptable results…The statistics and facts contained in this report and its Appendix […]
What Critics of Central City School Performance Ignore Students attending central city schools perform very poorly on statewide tests. For example, in Upstate New York, less than 20% of city students received passing grades on the 2015 Grades 3-8 New York State Statewide Assessment. In Syracuse, only 8.7% of students passed, while in Rochester, only 6.1% passed. In Buffalo, 13.4% of students passed. […]
Why the Poor in Upstate Cities find it Difficult to get Good Jobs With almost one third of upstate city residents and one half of upstate city families with children under 18 living in poverty, compared with less than 10% of suburban residents and families, it is helpful to understand how their demographic, social and educational characteristics, and how they differ from more affluent residents of the counties […]
