The fabulous cabaret singer Sophie Tucker, well known in the mid-20th century, said: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.”

If children have any say in the matter (they don’t), they should arrange to be born to a rich family. They would get regular medical care, nutritious meals, live in nice houses in safe neighborhoods. And their schools would get high ratings!

Jan Resseger writes about how schools in Ohio (and everywhere else) get high test scores:

Here is this morning’s post with new analysis added today from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s data wonk, Rich Exner, on the meaning of Ohio’s 2026 School Report Cards.

Please do read Exner’s analysis published this afternoon.

Leading with a bar graph correlating the Census Bureau child poverty rate with Ohio school districts’ overall school report card rankings, Exner demonstrates that, once again in 2026, Ohio’s ratings of the state’s public school districts on the annual state report card correlate with school districts’ aggregate family income and other factors known to contribute to opportunity gaps.  The Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) rates and ranks Ohio school districts based on standardized test scores along with several other factors the state now considers such as graduation rates and the amount of chronic absence among students.

Exner writes: “The 2026 Ohio school report cards released this week not only provided a snapshot of each school district, but they also once again drove home the point that wealthier districts usually do better, a cleveland.com analysis found. Perhaps the relationship is no clearer than in comparing districtwide child poverty rates from the Census Bureau to the overall star ratings issued by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Five-star districts, on average, have a child poverty rate of 6.1%, whereas schools scoring on the low-end with just two stars are nearly six times worse off for child poverty, at 35.1%, cleveland.com found.  The trend holds true at each step between, with child poverty averaging 8.5% for 4.5-star districts, 12.8% for four-star districts, 15.6% for 3.5-star districts, 23% for three-star districts and 30.1% for 2.5-star districts.”

Children’s test scores also correlate with related factors. For example, “Within the districts receiving two stars, just 15.6% of the adults age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or above. In the five-star districts, the rate is more than three times as high, at 48.5%.”

Exner examines the correlation of a each school district’s aggregate child poverty rate and the percentage of adults with a B.A. or above with the state’s overall ratings, and with rankings in each of the subcategories the state considers: school achievement as measured by test scores; progress; gap closing; graduation rates; early literacy; and college, career workforce, and military readiness.  In each case he confirms the years-long trend correlating the state’s ratings of public schools with socioeconomic factors.

—– Here is the original post published this morning —–

What Ohio’s New School Report Cards Really Mean

Earlier this week, the Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) released state report cards for each Ohio school district and every one of the state’s traditional public schools and charter schools. The Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reports: “Overall, English and math scores inched up statewide. The rate of chronic absenteeism inched downward and remains far from the state’s goal.”

A follow-up from Plain Dealer reporter Rich Exner lists Ohio’s top scoring schools: “Solon was among three Cuyahoga County districts scoring in the top five, and among 10 from the Greater Cleveland area in the top 25 statewide… Following Solon at the top of the list, in order, were Marion schools from western Ohio’s Mercer County, Chagrin Falls, Mariemont from outside Cincinnati, and Rocky River.”  The three greater Cleveland districts in that list are Solon, Chagrin Falls and Rocky River, all upper-income suburbs.

Although Ohio DEW releases the school district report cards every fall with lots of hoopla as a kind of race with clear winners and losers, the causes of disparities in standardized test scores from school to school and district to district are far more complicated. Aggregate standardized test scores for any school or any school district are primarily shaped by one set of variables that are rarely named: family income and the overall income of the community.  The standardized test score ranking is, in reality, a measure of economic privilege.

For years now, Rich Exner, the Plain Dealer’s data wonk, has followed up the state’s release of the state report cards with a far more nuanced analysis.  In 2019, Exner presented a set of bar graphs demonstrating the following: “The latest set of Ohio school report cards not only provided a scorecard for each district statewide – they once again drove home the point that wealthier districts do better on such reports… To get an idea of how closely report card grades from the Ohio Department of Education follow demographic factors, cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer) compared those grades to U.S. Census Bureau community data for household income, child poverty and the education level of the adults.  In nearly every key report card category, the trends followed census data closely.” I include one of Exner’s 2019 bar graphs depicting the correlation of Ohio state school report card rankings with family income.

Again last year, in 2025, when Ohio released the state school report cards, Exner reported the same pattern. While he notes a tiny number of encouraging exceptions when impoverished school districts made impressive test score gains, Exner explains: “For probably as long as the state has been issuing school report cards, one trend has held true – wealthier districts score better. Take this year when the richest 14 districts in the state based on the income of their residents all scored the highest available overall grade – five stars – on the new report cards.”  And he explains further: “Income, of course, is not the only measure tied to the trends. Where incomes are higher, this often increases the likelihood that parents in the districts have college degrees, or the existence of two-parent households, with two incomes. And there are other factors that raise challenges for individual school districts.”

Decades of Research Confirm the Trend Exner Identifies

The late professor of education and former president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology at the American Psychological Association (APA), David Berliner explained: “The big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… It’s neither this nations’ teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education.”

In Ohio, Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

In 2017, Katherine Michelmore of Syracuse University and Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan studied data from Michigan to identify the role of economic disadvantage in achievement gaps as measured by test scores: “We use administrative data from Michigan to develop a… detailed measure of economic disadvantage… Children who spend all of their school years eligible for subsidized meals have the lowest scores, whereas those who are never eligible have the highest. In eighth grade, the score gap between these two groups is nearly a standard deviation.” “Sixty percent of Michigan’s eighth graders were eligible for subsidized lunch at least once during their time in public schools. But just a quarter of these children (14% of all eighth graders) were economically disadvantaged in every year between kindergarten and eighth grade… Ninety percent of the test score gap we observe in eighth grade between the persistently disadvantaged and the never disadvantaged is present by third grade.”

In 2011, Stanford University educational sociologist, Sean Reardon reported on growing residential segregation by income—which correlates with segregation by race. Reardon used a massive data set to document the consequences of widening economic inequality for children’s outcomes at school. Reardon showed that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. By 2007, fewer families across America lived in mixed income communities. Reardon also demonstratedthat along with growing residential inequality and residential segregation by income is a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality school test score gap. The gap between the children with income in the top ten percent and the children with income in the bottom ten percent, was 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975, and twice as large as the black-white test score gap.

Then in 2016, Reardon documented: “The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district.” “The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. Average test scores of black students are, on average, roughly two grade levels lower than those of white students in the same district; the Hispanic-white difference is roughly one-and-a-half grade levels. Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.  The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.”

In 2022, Reardon commented on the factors that contribute to opportunity gaps: “We examine… test score gaps because they reflect… differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in cognitive skills or other genetic endowments… (D)ifferences in average scores should be understood as reflecting opportunity gaps….”

When standardized test scores are aggregated and compared from school district to school district, the disparities reflect economic inequality as well as economic segregation across U.S. school districts. Although in a smaller town a school district’s aggregate test scores may reflect the economic range of a diverse community, in any metropolitan area, some schools are filled with rich kids, while others are filled with poor kids.  And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools. They don’t tell us anything about the richness of the curriculum or the extracurricular offerings for enrichment.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students or whether students come to love learning.