LA Public School Quality

Kevin Drum writes a bit of a prelude to the latest Los Angeles public school controversy:

I don’t live in Los Angeles and don’t follow its affairs closely, but there’s at least one thing I can say about this: every single person I know who does follow LA politics, both liberal and conservative, thinks the LAUSD is a complete disaster. Obviously some of this is simply because LA has all the usual pathologies of urban school districts: it’s huge, it’s heavily poverty-ridden, it’s fantastically expensive to build new schools, and virtually all the middle class parents who normally drive concerns over quality have long since abandoned it for private schools. Still, even beyond that LA seems to be almost uniquely bad.

Fortunately, in some American cities this question is amenable to analysis since they agree to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ Trial Urban District Assessment program. And one of the few good things you can say about the LA Unified School District is that they’ve been consistent NAEP TUDA participants. So here’s a convenient summary of TUDA districts’ performance on 8th grade math relative to the average large American city. We see that LA’s black kids do worse than the average big city black kid. LA’s Latino kids do worse than the average big city Latino kid. And LA’s poor kids do worse than the average big city poor kid. LA’s non-poor kids, its white kids, and its Asian kids are average for kids in big city public school systems. Relative to the national average LA’s 8th grade math scores are below average for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. They’re below average for poor kids and they’re below average for non-poor kids. But LA’s non-Hispanic whites do right in line with the national average.

Poking around on the TUDA site can show you more, including scores for other grades and scores in other subject matters. But judging by the 8th grade math score, the conventional wisdom that LAUSD schools are bad seems to be right on the mark—they’re doing substantially worse than the average big city. That said, middle-class white parents should perhaps relax a bit since about the only thing LAUSD seems to be average at is educating middle-class white kids. And perhaps if more middle class white families were involved in the system there’d be more political support for improvements.

At any rate, the idea that all big city public school systems are equally troubled is a fairly pernicious myth. TUDA isn’t a perfect statistical analysis of every subgroup imaginable, but it reveals substantial differences in system performance from city to city. More cities should participate and more people should learn the data.