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Race Equity Trends > Education

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Third Grade Language Arts Differential

Significant disparities by race/ethnicity and family income in third grade language arts proficiency remain

Viewing tip: For the 2020 to 2021, and 2021 to 2022 school years, there is a perfect overlap of Asian student English Language Arts scores with the district-wide average; the green line representing these student scores overlays the “LPS Overall” baseline for these years. To better view data for each racial or ethnic group, click on the name of that group in the legend; doing so will highlight the data for that group across the years. You can also hover over the chart to show a pop-up box showing the data for that group.

Disparities exist in English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency by race/ethnicity and income. The relationship between household incomes and academic achievement has been studied extensively, finding performance in school to be strongly associated with children’s family income and their parent educational attainment.1

Concentration of poverty in schools is correlated with gaps in average student test scores. Research using 3rd through 8th grade math and ELA testing scores to examine the effect of school segregation on academic achievement found average school poverty rates between schools to be “consistently the single most powerful correlate of achievement gaps” between White and Black students. This suggests that strategies to reduce school segregation by poverty may lead to meaningful reductions in academic achievement gaps.2

Further, students experience with English should also be considered among the multitude of factors that can influence achievement on standardized testing. Compared to non-Hispanic White students, Latino/a/Hispanic students, on average, enter kindergarten with lower average math and ELA skills, but the gap narrows by about a third within the first two years of school and then remains relatively stable for the remainder of elementary school.3 In this same study, those children from homes where English is not spoken had the lowest average ELA and math scores upon entering kindergarten but made the largest gains in the early years of school.

In the 2021 to 2022 school year, 54% of students were ELA proficient, as measured by standardized testing.

  • 37.0% of students who receive free/reduced lunch (a proxy for low income4) were ELA proficient, which was 17 percentage points lower than the overall LPS student population.
  • 61.0% of students identified as White were ELA proficient, which was 7 percentage points higher than the overall LPS student population.
  • 54.0% of students identified as Asian were ELA proficient, which was the same as the overall LPS student population.
  • 38.0% of students identified as Latino/a or Hispanic were ELA proficient, which was 16 percentage points lower than the overall LPS student population.
  • 34.0% of students identified as Black or African American were ELA proficient, which was 20 percentage points lower than the overall LPS student population.
Notes

Nebraska Department of Education. (2022). Nebraska Education Profile (formerly Nebraska State of Schools Reports), Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment System.

Note that for the 2020 to 2021, and 2021 to 2022 school years, there is a perfect overlap of Asian student English Language Arts scores with the district-wide average; the line representing these student scores overlays the “LPS Overall” baseline for these years.

The NSCAS English Language Arts test from 2016-17 and later is not comparable to standardized tests from earlier years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NDE cancelled the 2019 – 2020 NSCAS assessment; therefore, there are no results from that year.

Footnotes
  1. Ladd, Helen F. (2012). Presidential Address: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 31(2)207-227.
  2. Reardon, S. (2016). School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2(5), 34–57.
  3. Reardon, S. F., & Galindo, C. (2009). The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. American Educational Research Journal, 46(3), 853-891.
  4. In general, students are eligible for free lunch if their household income is less than 130% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, and eligible for reduced lunch if their household income is less than 185% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines. In the 2023-24 school year, students in a family of four with a household income less than $39,000 would be eligible for free lunch, and those with a household income less than $55,500 would be eligible for reduced lunch. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. (2023). Child nutrition programs: Income eligibility guidelines. Federal Register/Vol. 88, No. 27/Thursday, February 9, 2023. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-02-09/pdf/2023-02739.pdf