How Money Talks in Westchester County, New York

If you think it’s only in your school district that wealthy kids do better in school, think again. It’s all over the nation — and it starts when children are quite young and poor ones are often not spoken to or read to nearly as much by their parents, so that kids from poor families actually start preschool with a vocabulary disadvantage.

A recent article by Dave Greene, a teacher, author and activist in Westchester County, NY, puts that into focus by examining a local magazine centerfold that gives average family household income and a bunch of other data about schools so that home-buyers can figure out how “good” the schools are.

The old real-estate saying is that the three most important things about a house are its location, its location, and its location. That’s not quite true: it really should be, the average income of the other folks in the neighborhood (or AIOFN), AIOFN, and AIOFN.

It’s also true with the schools, as the data make clear — and it’s even clearer still if you put the data into a graph, which the original author did not do.

So I did.

Here are two such graphs:

I hadn’t realized that there were poor as well as rich areas in Westchester County, but apparently there are. The line of best fit that Excel calculated shows a very, very strong correlation: r-squared is 0.8819, which means that R itself is about 93.9% — about the strongest correlation you’ll ever see in the social sciences. The two variables here are average household income and average SAT score (these go from 600 to 2400).

The next graph shows average family income versus a composite score of college readiness as measured by the New York State Regents.

Once again, an extremely tight correlation between average family income and college readiness score.

Read the original article for the original data and its source. Here is my spreadsheet: