Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Contents
	What Is the Economic Composition of the Student Body?
	What School Resources Are Available to Support Science Learning?
	What Is the Role of the School Principal?
	What Are the Schools’ Expectations of Parents?
	How Serious Are School Attendance Problems?
	How Safe and Orderly Are Schools?

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Reference 4
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E

 

 

© 2001 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Is the Economic Composition of the Student Body?

There is considerable evidence that student achievement is greater in schools with higher proportions of students from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.(1) To provide information on the composition of the student body, schools’ reports on the percentage of their students that are eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch are summarized in Exhibit 7.1 for each of the Benchmarking participants.(2) The Benchmarking participants span almost the complete range on this factor, from the Naperville School District and the Academy School District, with just a few percent of low-income students, to the Jersey City Public Schools, where almost all students (89 percent) were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch. Although science achievement was not perfectly correlated with the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, it is noticeable that several high-performing jurisdictions had low percentages of eligible students, and that three of the four lowest-performing(3) – the Chicago Public Schools, the Rochester City School District, and the Jersey City Public Schools – had the highest percentages of such students.