Colorado's poorest schools have fewer highly effective teachers than the wealthiest schools, raising equity concerns
Colorado's "highly effective" teachers are unequally distributed across its public schools, according to a Denver Gazette analysis of the state education department's teacher evaluation data.
The poorer a school is in Colorado, the more likely it is to have fewer "highly effective" teachers, while top-rated teachers are mostly concentrated in the state’s wealthier schools, the analysis from the Gazette, a sister publication of Colorado Politics, showed.
Although some researchers say the metric is flawed to begin with, the findings reinforce the link between educational outcomes and families’ level of poverty or wealth.
For every 5-percentage point increase in the number of students receiving free or reduced lunch at a school — a widely accepted proxy for the school’s poverty level — the data suggests there will be a 2-percentage point decrease in the portion of teachers with the highest state effectiveness rating.
And while the statistical relationship between the two factors is modest for schools that fall into the broad middle of the poverty-wealth continuum, the correlation is notably stronger when focusing on schools at the extremes.
At the top of the wealth scale, in schools where fewer than 10% of students get a subsidized lunch through the National School Lunch Program, an average of 61% of teachers were given the “highly effective” rating in the most current data.