A new report finds that public school children in New York City have access to vastly different educational opportunities based on where they live.
Among its findings, the report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, of Cambridge, Mass., says that using the “opportunity to learn” index—calculated by sorting all New York City middle schools by their 8th grade results on state English/language arts exams—schools scoring the lowest are in the poorest neighborhoods of Harlem, the South Bronx, and central Brooklyn.
The study calculates that doubling the share of a community school district’s teachers who are “highly educated"—master’s degrees plus 30 more hours of training—could result in a 600 percent increase in the chances of a black or Hispanic student scoring at the top level on those exams.
Because highly educated teachers are distributed unevenly through the city, the result is inequitable per-student funding, the study says.
