School

State tests given from third through eighth grade can be placed on a single national scale, which puts districts and counties in different states side by side. Schooling can be measured in at least three ways, and they describe different things. A level is where average scores stand. A rate of learning is how fast students move from one grade to the next. Exclusion is who is removed from the classroom, which Chapter 3.4, School discipline and incarceration measures with suspensions and expulsions. The first two written chapters measure levels and the last measures exclusion. Every comparison is between districts or counties, none describes an individual student, and an average level is not a school's contribution, since it reflects families, neighborhoods, health and schools together.

Chapter 3.1, Test scores, class and race measures how far apart county average scores are, in grade levels, and finds that average achievement rises with county income. Inside the same districts, white students score above Black students, and students who are not economically disadvantaged score above those who are. The chapter asks how much each gap varies from county to county and reports studies of Head Start and school spending under their own designs. The scores pool many school years, and the estimates pull a place with few tests toward the average of similar places, which narrows the spread the chapter reports.

Chapter 3.2, Gender gaps in reading and math compares girls and boys within the same districts, which holds schools and neighborhoods fixed in a way that a comparison of richer and poorer districts cannot. Girls score higher than boys in reading in the average district, while the math gap has no common sign and moves with district income. A gap that keeps one sign in almost every district does not depend on the district, and a gap whose sign changes with district income varies with place, so the chapter reads the two gaps differently. It does not test why the math gap moves with income.

Chapter 3.3, Learning growth and starting level (planned) will move from levels to growth and ask whether students in districts that start behind learn faster or slower between third and eighth grade. Until it is written, the part describes where scores stand and says nothing about how fast children in any district learn.

Chapter 3.4, School discipline and incarceration holds both kinds. Out-of-school suspensions are more common in more deprived districts, and Black students are suspended at higher rates than white students in the same district. Among children from low-income families raised in the same tract, Black children were incarcerated on Census Day 2010 at a higher rate than white children. The district records and the Atlas describe different children, so neither result tests the other.