When schools provide Saturday catch-up classes, disadvantaged students earn higher scores, but advantaged students do worse, concludes an analysis of Florida data by David Figlio, dean of Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, and researcher Krzysztof Karbownik.
The study looked at 12 school policies and practices: seven produced much different outcomes for disadvantaged and advantaged students.
For example, summer school for all students was linked to lower scores for disadvantaged students, but higher scores for their advantaged classmates. The opposite was true for summer school geared to low-performing students.
Here are two charts:
Additional professional development for teachers helped the disadvantaged, but hurt the advantaged. Multi-age classrooms had a negative effect on both, but much worse for the disadvantaged. By contrast, specialist teachers — usually math/science teachers for upper-elementary students — had a much larger negative effect for advantaged students.
Providing monetary incentives for teachers was linked to higher scores for both groups of students.
Tutoring for low-performing students had very little effect, according to the study.