There's Still No Free Lunch: Poverty as a Composite of SES Predicts School-Level Reading Comprehension

School-level performance on standardized reading comprehension was obtained for 259 public schools in a South Florida district with 270,000 children. Eleven percent of the students were English Language Learners (ELLs), and another 20% were English proficient (EP) and former ELLs, for a total of 31% or about 87,000 ELL students. Thirty-eight percent of all children, or about 100,000, qualified for free or reduced lunch (FRL) because of low family income. This study conducts a school-level analysis where SES markers are as available (and reliable) in both poor and relatively rich schools. Socioeconomic status included the percentage of children in the school with FRL, the average family income, and the average cost of the homes in the neighborhood of the school. Poverty is particularly important to define in a complex way in South Florida because bilingual status interacts with it to a substantial degree. Six unit-weighted composite variables including poverty, bilingualism, ethnicity, child risk behaviors, school resources, and teacher resources were created from 22 measured school-level variables. Schools identified as resilient are important because they have higher reading scores and higher poverty levels than other schools. Other notable characteristics of these resilient schools are that they obtain more state money per pupil, have less crime, and have a better student to teacher ratio.