Disadvantaged students receive less effective teaching, on average, than other students, according to a study of 29 large school districts.
Researchers from Mathematica Policy Research, based in Princeton, N.J., gauged teachers’ effectiveness by their students’ test-score growth. They found that teaching quality varied more from school to school than it did within the same schools, suggesting that instructional inequities are mostly due to which schools students attend rather than the classes to which they are assigned.
The findings are drawn from three years of testing data for students in grades 4-8.
