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"The portfolio district model adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is often held up as a national model for high school "choice," touted as the best way to reduce pernicious race- and income-based achievement gaps. According to this model, student demographics are "no excuse" for poor performance: teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student success. But this AISR study on college readiness shows that in spite of a decade of efforts in New York City to expand choice and ensure that the most disadvantaged students do not invariably attend the most disadvantaged schools, student demographics still stubbornly dictate destiny."

There's no mystery or proprietary secret among academics or statisticians and data geeks as to how to construct simple comparisons of school demographics using available data.  It's really not that hard. It doesn't require bold assumptions, nor does it require complex statistical models. Sometimes, all that's needed to shed light on a situation is a simple descriptive summary of the relevant data.  Below is a "how to" (albeit sketchy) with links to data for doing your own exploring of charter and traditional public school demographics, by grade level and location.

The public charter school movement has grown rapidly in the 20 years since the first public charter school opened in 1992, with over 5,600 schools now serving more than two million students. One of the most exceptional developments within the first two decades of the movement has been the rise of high performing public charter schools with missions intently focused on educating students from traditionally underserved communities. Given that the demographics of these communities are often homogenous, it is no surprise the demographics of these schools are that way as well. In fact, the student populations at these public charter schools usually mirror the populations in nearby district schools. While much media attention rightly has been given to these schools, the past decade or so also has seen a noteworthy rise in high performing public charter schools with missions intentionally designed to serve racially and economically integrated student populations. These schools are utilizing their autonomy to achieve a diverse student population through location-based strategies, recruitment efforts and enrollment processes. Perhaps most notably, a growing number of cities-and the parents and educators in them-are welcoming both types of public charter school models for their respective (and in some cases unprecedented) contributions to raising student achievement, particularly for students who have previously struggled in school. This brief showcases this development in three of these cities: Denver, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

Recent analyses challenge common wisdom regarding the superiority of private schools relative to public schools, raising questions about the role of school processes and climate in shaping achievement in different types of schools. While holding demographic factors constant, this multilevel analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data on over 270,000 fourth and eighth graders in over 10,000 schools examines differences among schools on five critical factors: (1) school size, (2) class size, (3) school climate/parental involvement, (4) teacher certification, and (5) instructional practices. This study provides nationally representative evidence that both teacher certification and some reform-oriented mathematics teaching practices correlate positively with achievement and are more prevalent in public schools than in demographically similar private schools. Additionally, smaller class size, more prevalent in private schools, is significantly correlated with achievement.

The release of a new "State of the Sector" report by the New York City Charter School Center will hopefully mark a turning point in efforts to have a more substantive conversation about charter schools' demographics and performance in our city. As local media have noted, the report is one of the first from within the charter sector itself to acknowledge some troubling data on charter schools that we and other analysts have been discussing for several years.

We examine the effects of charter schools on reading and mathematics achievement for students who attend charter schools in the School District of Philadelphia. The report also examines several other important questions about charter schools, including: What are the effects of years of operation, grades served, mission, and demographics of charter schools on student achievement?  What types of students do charter schools attract?  Do charter schools have higher student turnover rates than traditional public schools?  Does the existence of charter schools have an impact on student achievement in traditional public schools?

"In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."

This study makes a distinction between a school having high attrition and one having difficulties in hiring. It does so by exploring the relationship between definitions of hard-to-staff schools, school demographics, and school conditions that are often associated with a school being hard-to-staff.

Whether charter schools will increase segregation in schools and, ultimately, in society is an important and hotly contested question. Charter proponents point to the high enrollments of minority and economically disadvantaged pupils in charter schools, compare them with overall state enrollment percentages, and contend that charter schools are integrative. Opponents explain these enrollment levels by noting the high minority and poverty concentrations in the urban areas where charter schools are centered. They quote other research suggesting that the schools exacerbate existing segregation. Gary Miron, Jessica Urschel, William Mathis, and Elana Tornquist examine this issue using a national data base of schools operated by Education Management Organizations (EMOs), 95% of which are charter schools. The study explores whether these EMO-operated charter schools integrate or segregate students by four key demographic characteristics: ethnic/minority classification, socioeconomic status, disabling condition and English language facility.

In 2009, the state law granting the Mayor control of the New York City public school system was renewed. That renewal included a requirement that the New York City Independent Budget Office "enhance official and public understanding" of educational matters of the school system. The law also requires the Chancellor of the school system to provide IBO with the data that we deem necessary to conduct our analyses. That data began to flow to IBO at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. This report is our first annual summary of that data. Over the course of the last year, we have issued a number of detailed analyses of specific topics, and we will continue to produce those types of reports. This current report is designed as a descriptive overview of the school system rather than as an in-depth look at particular issues. It is organized into three main sections. The first presents demographic information on the students who attend New York City's public schools. The next section describes the resources-budgets, school staff, and buildings-that the school system utilizes. The final section describes the measurable outcomes of the school system's efforts for particular subgroups of students.

...mounting evidence suggests that the seeming relationship between student demographics and teacher turnover is driven, not by teachers' responses to their students, but by the conditions in which they must teach and their students are obliged to learn.

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and aims to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools

In an era when school reform and budget savings are championed by representatives of both major political parties, Long Island cannot economically, politically, or culturally afford to maintain small racially segregated school districts. Based on demographic data available in New York: The State of Learning, an annual statistical profile of New York State school districts, Malverne schools and schools in surrounding communities do not have to be racially segregated. In near by Rockville Centre, 80 percent of the students are white. If Malverne, Lakeview, and Rockville Centre were combined into one school district, the student population would be 53 percent white, 30 percent black, 13 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian. If we think even more broadly and Malverne, Lakeview, Rockville Centre, West Hempstead, Lynbrook, and East Rockaway were consolidated into a manageable district with under 11,000 students, the student population would be 69 percent white, 14 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent Asian.

"New schools founded in the last three years get more money per student than schools the city began shutting down this year, a Daily News analysis finds. Under a reform - ironically called Fair Student Funding - the city distributes the bulk of school funding based on the enrollment and demographics of each school. The reform introduced in 2007 hasn't been fully funded because of budget cuts in recent years, but all 30 new schools opening this year get their full share of the money to which they're entitled while the struggling schools remain badly underfunded."

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

A federal appeals court has upheld a Pennsylvania school district's attendance-zone plan that took neighborhood racial demographics into account but did not assign individual students based on race.

The rules under which charter schools operate - Federal, state and local - are supposed to ensure equal access to charters and to prevent discrimination.  In theory preference should be given to those in the local area, which then in theory should provide a student body with demographics very much like those of surrounding neighborhood schools from which their students are drawn.

Education policies that affect millions of students have long been tied to test scores, but a new paper suggests those scores are regularly misinterpreted. According to the new research out of Mathematica, a statistical research group, the comparisons sometimes used to judge school performance are more indicative of demographic change than actual learning.

This article takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers who were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With these data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

Demographic imbalances between charter schools and traditional public schools have led experts to ask if charter schools are open to all students.