Contacts:
Simon Aronoff, (415) 901-0111 saronoff@fenton.com
Robert Perez, (415) 901-0111 rperez@fenton.com

 California Department of Education-Corrected Poverty Data Reveals Even Bigger Gaps

ETW Recalculates Estimates Based on CDE Corrections; New Figures Show Even Bigger Funding Gap for California's Low-Income Students

(Oakland, CA) – Today the California Department of Education (CDE) announced (http://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr05/) that previously released data, available on its Web site, included errors in the reporting of numbers of children who take part in free and reduced lunch (FRL) programs.  These data are critical for understanding poverty rates at schools and districts across California.

The CDE had quietly released its revised data at an earlier date without making a formal announcement. When the Education-Trust West (ETW) discovered the errors earlier this week, the CDE agreed to publicly acknowledge that the data had been faulty and that they have since been set straight.

Education Trust-West relied on the CDE’s original data for our report released earlier last month, California’s Hidden Teacher Spending Gap: How State and District Budgeting Practices Shortchange Poor and Minority Students.

In light of the CDE’s revised data, we’ve recalculated our estimates.

Our revised estimates show even more strongly that there is a pervasive teacher salary gap between high-poverty and affluent schools within districts in California. Our newly revised report can be found at www.hiddengap.org.

Education Trust-West used CDE data on students’ participation in free and reduced lunch programs to determine the highest- and lowest-poverty schools within school districts across California. The new CDE data show increases in the number of children in these programs, which altered our identification of high- and low-poverty schools.

Some highlights from the newly revised report:

• Forty-two (not 40 as we originally reported) of the 50 largest school districts have a gap between the average salaries of the teachers in the poorest schools and the teachers in the most affluent schools. On average, this translates to an estimated $2,576 less per teacher.

• In most districts, there were no changes in the FRL percentages. However, in 64 districts there were changes that resulted in adjusted teacher salary gaps between the highest-poverty and lowest-poverty schools. These new salary gaps, for the most part, are larger than we first reported.

• The revised FRL data have also resulted in changes in our estimates of the overall gaps in average teacher salaries between high- and low-poverty schools in 13 of the 50 largest school districts. Of these 13 districts, San Francisco Unified School District was the only district where the salary gap between high- and low-poverty schools decreased. The teacher salary gaps increased in the remaining 12 school districts.

Because the new numbers from the Department relate only to percentages of low-income students in California, the minority gap numbers in our report remain unchanged. 

We welcome the opportunity to talk with you in further depth about what these changes mean or to answer any questions you might have. Please contact Robert Perez (rperez@fenton.com) or Simon Aronoff (saronoff@fenton.com) at (415) 901-0111 to schedule a media interview with ETW Executive Director Russlynn Ali about the findings.

The production and release of this report was funded by The Broad Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To download this report and for more information, visit www.HiddenGap.org

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