Wealthy families do not worry about food, or transportation, or whether walking to school involves crossing a gang boundary.

They have shelter, and health care when they need it. If a crisis hits, they have savings to fall back on – or at least access to credit on reasonable terms.

If you haven't lived in poverty, it is hard to imagine it.

How are poverty and education related?

Poverty correlates strongly with academic results. Schools with low test scores nearly always have a lot of families living in poverty. Schools where families have a comfortable income always have good scores. This correlation is very stable. For example, the chart below shows scores on the Nation's Report Card (NAEP), highlighting districts in Massachusetts and California. On this chart, "up" is good — clearly, students at any economic level tend to do better in Massachusetts than in California… but it makes an even bigger difference to be affluent.

Schools where many students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch ('FRPL' in edspeak) tend to have lower scores than those where families are wealthier. Across the wealth spectrum, scores in California districts lag substantially behind those in Massachusetts. (Chart: Sean F. Reardon from 'The Landscape of US Educational Inequality')

The connection between economic well-being and education results is one of the most enduring relationships in all of education research. It shows up everywhere. For example, there are predictable gaps in the scores of the ACT tests that students take as part of the college application process. In a 2015 chart from a multi-year study, the ACT identified a set of benchmarks to compare how well students are prepared for college and career. While 42% of students from families with incomes above $100,000 met all four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, only 13% of low income students (under $36,000) did.

Is this correlation an artifact of the design of the ACT? No, it shows up everywhere. In 2021 the gap appeared, as usual, in the results of California's annual standardized test, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP). About 36% of students from low-income families met or exceeded grade-level standards in English Language Arts/Literacy. For students not in low-income families, the ratio was flipped — about 2/3 met grade-level standards in English Language Arts/Literacy, and half met or exceeded grade-level standards in mathematics.

The connection between money and testable evidence of learning is amplified at the extremes. For example, about a third of students from families not living in poverty scored in the "exceeded standards" range. But only about one in ten students from a low-income family did so.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studied a group of tenth-grade students from families that differed in family income or socioeconomic status (SES) over a ten-year span. The results are summarized in this video:

For a long time, poverty statistics depended on lunch

For decades, many poverty statistics in education relied on a crude definition of poverty: whether a student's family qualified for the free lunch program. This was a useful distinction, but sloppy. Families either qualified or didn't. This left room for big differences. It's like calling both Tom Cruise and Kevin Hart "short." Sure, neither should be cast as a star player in a movie about basketball, but they don't equally miss the mark, right?

During the pandemic, school lunch service was made free for all students, and as of 2023 it seems likely to stay that way, at least in California. Before access to school lunch became universal, about half of California students qualified for it. It was a costly paperwork hassle and many families experienced a sense of shame about it.

Some groups of students tend to do better in school than others. The patterns, known as achievement gaps, are the subject of Lesson 9.6. Gaps associated with poverty and ethnicity are strongly correlated. African American and Hispanic students are much more likely to be poor, and their parents often have less education than white and Asian students. These gaps contribute to lasting differences in family wealth. For example, Black boys in almost all neighborhoods earn less in adulthood than white boys growing up in families with comparable income.

Poverty In California is worse than average

Poverty hurts kids. Families living on the edge find it harder to provide their kids with healthy and productive spaces and places to focus on learning. The challenges of poverty are great everywhere, but they are particularly stark in California. The chart below compares poverty levels by state just before the Pandemic. During the pandemic, federal aid temporarily mitigated poverty in California.

Achievement gaps part 1: Race

Race correlates with test scores and other outcome measures like high school completion or college completion. The effects are not just attributable to poverty. For example, in a 2015 study of the SAT scores of more than a million students attending the University of California, sociologist Saul Geiser found a strong pattern:

Race shows up in patterns in other studies, too, such as the international PISA exam:

The chart above mingles international test data with American PISA test scores disaggregated by race/ethnicity. This view underscores the reality that test scores in the US have much to do with the complex history of American immigration. For example, a 2018 analysis points out that recent sub-Saharan African immigrants consistently out-perform other definable immigrant groups in measures of educational attainment.

Scholars including Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson and Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond have tackled the complex issues of race in education. Some of the most frequently cited sources of patterns in the educational achievement of groups include hidden underinvestment; variances in family social capital; persistent cultural effects; and various effects of racism including race-based differences in expectations.

GreatSchools.org collects data about schools, examining student demographics and student outcomes including test results. In a 2017 report, Searching for Opportunity: Examining Racial Gaps in Access to Quality Schools in California, the organization focused attention on the small number of schools with a record of success for African-American and Latino students. The introduction to the report expresses the gap plainly:

The GreatSchools report shows that few Latino and African American students attend schools where students like them score well. Conversely, few Asian or white students attend schools where students like them score poorly. Few, however, is not the same as none. The report goes on to identify 156 high-performing "spotlight schools" where African-American and Latino students score highly. These schools, half of them with relatively high poverty, show what's possible.

Achievement gaps part 2: Poverty

John Scalzi, author and social commentator, has suggested a provocative analogy to support discussion about the roles of race, gender, class and sexual orientation in education and life. He imagines life as a video game in which the difficulty setting is determined by your demographics. "In the role playing game known as The Real World," Scalzi proposes, "'Straight White Male' is the lowest difficulty setting there is... the 'Gay Minority Female' setting? Hardcore."

The following video examines different educational and life outcomes of two children born into different neighborhoods.

Definitions of poverty matter

Researchers define poverty in different ways, and states have some influence over the definitions. For example, is a family counted as poor if it falls below a certain income level, or must it remain below that level for an entire year? What if it falls only a tiny bit below or above the line?

Poverty is more than a lack of money. Economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan has amassed evidence that scarcity itself taxes the mind. It's not just that bad decisions make people poor, this work suggests: "Instead, people make bad decisions because they are poor." Poverty creates its own negative feedback loop.

Many theories of change in education seek to identify what combination of factors, in terms of students’ experiences both in and out of school, cause poverty and ethnicity to correlate so strongly with learning. Some of those factors are explored in the next few lessons.

Last updated September, 2023.
Past edits include:
July 2022, removed now-irrelevant detail about means-testing for school lunch program.
December 2020, various
Jan, 2020 linked to blog post about homelessness.
Sep, 2018, adding video from NCES.
Jan, 2018 added African immigrant achievement and GreatSchools "Searching for Opportunity" report.
Oct, 2017 explaining supplemental poverty measure
April 2017 added chart comparing scores in Massachusetts.