So what I'm going to show you is some data that was made possible by the,
the quality of information collected in this school district.
And they measure, every fall they give a,
a very good test to measure learning in the children.
And it, this particular test is designed for these new strategies
of analysis that measure change over time in individual children,
but you can do look at change over time in large groups of children.
And we're particularly interested in reading and math.
And I'm going to show you some of the results from math.
But let me explain the four groups you're going to be seeing.
We were expecting that, because of our other research, that homeless and
highly mobile children, children who had ever experienced homelessness during
the study, would be at very high risk,
because there was a lot of evidence that that's the case.
So, we were expecting that they would be the highest risk group if we
put their results together.
The next highest risk group we thought would be children who were very low
income, they were qualified for free lunch at school, which in,
in this country you get eligible for that by having a very low income.
So many of these children are living in poverty and
they really count on having free lunch at school.
They're at moderately high risk because they have a lot of poverty but
they also have other risk factors in their lives in many cases.
Then we have children who are not qualified for free lunch, but
they get a reduced price meal because they have low income, but they're not as,
as poor, their families, as the children who receive free lunch.
And we thought that they would have less risk for
academic achievement than these first two groups.
And then the other group was our low risk group.
These are children who were never qualified for free lunch or
reduced price meals, and never, as far as we know, had been homeless or
living in an emergency shelter.
These are just ordinary children who appear to be more advantaged.
And what I want to show you is their scores on this standardized achievement
test, that as I told you, is a very good measure, variable measuring learning.
And here are the results of this study.
First I want you to notice that's a very large sample size.
This, this data that you're looking at reflects the achievement of
more than 26,000 children in the school district.
This is all.
We analyzed all the data that were available.
And the data we looked at was repeated measures, over time.
Each fall, when the children were in grades 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, and 8, the, they, they were tested on this measure.
And the measure is designed to make it possible so
you can see how much they're learning over time.
And their scores are over here.