I was under the impression that our highest-poverty, lowest-achieving students were being saddled with our most inexperienced teachers.
Apparently, that’s not quite so.
Brand-new teachers abound everywhere in DCPS, and continue to quit in droves in the middle of the year or after just one or two years. It’s not just in high-poverty schools: it’s everywhere.
This graph shows the lack of correlation between the median hire date of all staff at all DC public schools that I could find data on, and the percentages of students deemed eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The latter status is generally used as our only way to judge the students’ families’ poverty level. The median hire date is the date where half of the staff were hired before that date, and the other half were hired after that date.
I tried running a linear regression, and the correlation was so low (o.o2) that it’s not worth considering.
What is significant is the fact that we have in DCPS about twenty schools that have less than 50% of their students in poverty, and we have about a hundred (yes, roughly 100) schools with very high poverty rates.
Here’s the graph:
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