By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

WSJ - 9/12/11

Middle-class public schools educate the majority of U.S. students but pay lower teacher salaries, have larger class sizes and spend less per pupil than low-income and wealthy schools, according to a report to be issued Monday.

The report, "Incomplete: How Middle-Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade," also found middle-class schools are underachieving. It pointed to their national and international test scores and noted that 28% of their graduates earn a college degree by age 26, compared to 17% for lower-income students and 47% for upper-income students.

Third Way, a Democratic think tank that claims to "advocate for private sector economic growth," based its report on data from the Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education, and national and international testing programs. The report doesn't include parochial or private-school students.

Over the next decade, nearly two-thirds of job openings will require some post-secondary education, the report says, arguing that middle-class schools need to help better prepare their students to graduate from college.

"Middle-class schools produce students who are the backbone of the U.S. economy, and they are not performing as well as parents, policy makers and taxpayers think they are," said Tess Stovall, deputy director of Third Way's economic program and co-author of the report. "We need a second phase of education reform to ensure these schools get the attention they deserve."

During the past few decades, most prominent U.S. education reforms—charter schools, vouchers, school closures and the federal No Child Left Behind law—have been aimed in large part at low-income schools. But middle-class schools, defined as those where between 26% and 75% of students are poor enough to receive free or reduced-price federal lunch, have received less research and attention, the report says.

Results from recent national elementary math, reading, history and geography exams show low-income students—even though they still perform poorly—are making more progress than middle- and upper-class ones. On many of these exams, low-income students are posting double-digit gains toward proficiency, while middle-income students are posting single-digit gains.

Michele Rhee, the former chief of Washington, D.C., schools who heads the advocacy group Students First, said the country must focus on fixing fundamental flaws in public education, such as how teachers are paid, hired and laid off. "But for this movement to really gain hold, we need to engage the middle-class parents who think their schools are doing just fine," she said.

Middle-class schools educate 25.7 million, or 53%, of all public-school students, and more than half of all white and African-American students, 50% of Hispanic students and 45% of Asians, the report notes.

The average salary of teachers in middle-class schools is $48,432, compared with $54,035 for upper-income schools and $50,035 for lower-income schools, according to the report. Schools in the middle have an average student-to-teacher ratio of 17.5, compared with 14.6 for upper-income schools and 17 for lower-income ones.

Middle-class districts spend $10,349 per student, compared with $11,925 for upper-class schools and $11,799 for low-income schools, the report says. The report calculated spending by district because individual school data are not available on a national level. The disparities can be attributed in part to the fact that low-income schools get additional federal dollars and schools in upper-class neighborhoods have a higher property-tax base.

According to the report, less than a third of students who attend middle-class schools score proficient on national 4th- and 8th-grade reading and 8th-grade math exams. About 36% are proficient in 4th-grade math.

In upper-income schools, more than half the students are proficient on the 4th- and 8th-grade reading and 4th-grade math, while 46% are proficient in 8th-grade reading. In low-income schools, less than 20% of students are proficient on all of those exams.

"When we talk about closing the achievement gaps, we need to bring the low-income kids up, but we also need to raise scores of the other kids," said Amy Wilkins, Vice President of Government Affairs for Education Trust, a non-profit that focuses on poor and minority families. "Just chasing mediocrity isn't enough."

In the San Diego Unified School District, middle-class schools will have to get by on less after the school board voted in December to divert about $20 million in federal money from middle-class schools.

Under the plan, to be phased in over five years, the district will take the money from 60 schools with poverty rates between 40% and 75% and send it to poorer schools.

Michael George, principal of Taft Middle School in San Diego, which has a low-income rate of 60% to 80% depending on the year and is at risk of losing $146,000, said he uses the extra money to pay for a math teacher hired to help kids who are in the middle of the pack on achievement. Shifting the funds "is shortsighted and would be devastating," he said.

Linda Zintz, spokeswoman for San Diego schools, said board members didn't make the decisions lightly and shifted the money only after years of consideration, because "they felt higher-poverty schools really had some added issues and special needs and needed these resources badly."

Write to Stephanie Banchero at stephanie.banchero@wsj.com