Student poverty concentration within schools adversely affects the academic achievement of students, particularly children of color from lower-income families. Long-standing patterns of neighborhood and school segregation mean the average Black student attends a school with a much larger share of students of color and students from families experiencing poverty than the average white student. The high-poverty schools attended by Black students tend to lack the educational resources available in low-poverty schools, such as highly qualified and experienced teachers, low student-teacher ratios, college prerequisite and advanced placement courses, and extracurricular activities.

Metric: Share of students attending high-poverty schools, by student race or ethnicity

This metric is constructed separately for each racial or ethnic group and reports the share of students attending schools in which over 40 percent of the student body receives free or reduced-price meals. Most assessments of meal programs are through the National School Lunch Program.

Validity: This metric captures the interaction of economic and racial segregation of schools and therefore reveals whether (and to what degree) students of color are more likely than white students to attend schools with large concentrations of classmates experiencing poverty. Higher concentrations of students experiencing poverty are associated with worse achievement for all the students in a school.

Availability: This metric can be constructed using information from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data through the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal. Those data come from an annual census of schools reporting total enrollment by race across each grade. That census includes a measure of “economic disadvantage” for students based on their eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals, which is used as a proxy for poverty.

Frequency: New data for the metric are available annually.

Geography: This metric can be computed at the school district, city, and county levels. Because this metric reflects the structural conditions facing a jurisdiction’s students, changes in the metric may represent changes to those structural conditions.

Consistency: Not all states report free or reduced-price lunch. Instead, four states report the number of students directly certified. Two other states report both free and reduced-priced lunches and the number of students directly certified across schools. However, this metric overall is consistently defined and calculated for cities and counties.

Subgroups: This metric is by definition disaggregated by race or ethnicity.

Limitations: Some school districts confer eligibility for free and reduced-price school meals using community eligibility standards that can apply to clusters of schools as well as entire districts. For example, if a cluster of schools serve a set of low-income neighborhoods, and across the schools, 40 percent or more of the students qualify for free and reduced-price meals, the district can provide meals to all students at all schools in the cluster even if one of the schools wouldn’t meet the threshold on its own. Consequently, this metric may overstate student poverty exposure in those districts. Fortunately, the data sources for this metric allow us to identify the districts using this approach, and findings can be interpreted with this in mind. Changes in this metric need to be assessed with reference to changes in the area’s overall racial or ethnic composition and the poverty rate among its residents.