Kids in Poverty Often Lag in Reading. In St. Louis, They’re Even Further Behind

St. Louis is a poor city. Its school district serves a higher share of children living in poverty than 95% of communities nationwide. 

Decades of research has shown that growing up in poverty hurts academic outcomes. So what can reasonably be expected of children in places like St. Louis? Through no fault of their own, they are more likely to have lower reading and math scores. But how much lower? 

Policymakers rarely ask these types of questions. But without controlling for poverty, a school or district might look “bad” mainly because its students started off further behind. On the other end, a school might look “good” largely because its students came in the door with numerous advantages.

In a recent analysis with The 74’s Eamonn Fitzmaurice, I went looking for school districts across the country that were outperforming expectations. Given their demographics, which were doing the best job of helping students learn to read? Unfortunately, St. Louis was not one of those positive outliers. 

The chart below from our analysis shows the state of Missouri. Each district is one dot. The diagonal red line in the graph is called the best fit line. It shows the relationship between poverty and reading scores. Like other states’, Missouri’s line slopes downward from left to right, indicating that, in general, third-grade reading proficiency tends to fall as poverty rises. 

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Missouri Third Grade Reading Proficiency

But there are districts above and below the best fit line. St. Louis is near the bottom right, meaning its third-grade reading scores are well below what might be expected based on its student poverty level. 

It’s certainly not alone. For example, other high-poverty school districts surrounding St. Louis, notably Ferguson-Florissant, Riverview Gardens, Normandy Schools Collaborative and University City, are also underperforming. Indeed, the St. Louis branch of the NAACP recently filed a formal civil rights complaint about low literacy levels across school districts in the area. 

This type of analysis also helps uncover districts that are doing a truly exceptional job of helping kids learn to read. For example, Greenville has a similar poverty level as St. Louis but helps a much higher percentage of students read proficiently by third grade. Similarly, Poplar Bluff has about the same poverty level as Ferguson does but gets four times as many third graders reading proficiently. 

In general, lower-poverty districts have higher literacy rates, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. In fact, several of the wealthier school districts in St. Louis County, such as Webster Groves, Brentwood, Ladue and Clayton are all clustered at the top left of the graph. They have very low poverty and some of the highest reading scores in the state. But, importantly, this type of comparison makes clear that those districts are not merely coasting on their student demographics — they are helping students outperform their already-high expectations. 

The relationship between a district’s poverty rate and its reading scores varies across states. In Missouri, the connection is weaker than it is in most others. That is, the red line in Missouri’s graph is flatter, and the dots are farther above and below the line than they are in other states. This could be due to the large number of districts Missouri has, how students are sorted across those districts or differences in the tests the states use.

Controlling for district demographics is especially important in an analysis like this, focused on early reading skills. Unlike math, where learning is more directly tied to school-based instruction, literacy is multi-faceted and interrelated with vocabulary and other background knowledge that children acquire at home. (St. Louis has similar underperformance in math, but that’s the subject for another piece.) 

The state of Missouri is working to revamp its approach to literacy, and local activists are taking matters into their own hands to help more students learn to read. Comparing poverty levels and student performance can help policymakers identify which schools and districts are adding value for students and which could be doing better. For now at least, St. Louis appears to be underperforming on this metric. 

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