Chapter 4: Beyond Binary Indicators: Measuring Socioeconomic Status and Capturing Socioeconomic Heterogeneity in High-Poverty Contexts

Educational policymakers and researchers in the United States are increasingly concerned with the inadequacy of existing measures of poverty and socioeconomic status (SES) available in administrative datasets. Yet, old binary indicators are being replaced with new binary indicators, which do not distinguish among students facing meaningfully different levels of disadvantage. In this chapter, I address the limitations of binary SES indicators, especially for understanding educational issues and implementing educational policies in high-poverty contexts. I begin with an overview of existing research on the limitations of existing SES measures in educational research, and I discuss the limitations of binary measures of disadvantage (and other alternatives that researchers have considered) when focusing on high-poverty schools and districts in particular. Then, I highlight socioeconomic heterogeneity among Detroit students, using a novel set of survey data that includes more robust measures of SES than are available in administrative datasets. I also show how these SES differences are relevant in the context of a recent state educational funding adequacy study. In doing so, I illustrate the need for more granular and multidimensional measures of SES for educational research and policymaking. I conclude with recommendations for constructing such measures in the administrative datasets upon which policymakers, practitioners, and researchers rely.