Vox reports on “How your city’s public schools really stack up:”
America’s big-city public schools have a generally poor reputation, which tends to dissuade middle-class white families from enrolling their kids in them. But we also know that socioeconomically disadvantaged kids tend to do poorly on tests compared with whiter and more affluent ones, regardless of local school effects.
So controlling for the impact of demographics is helpful in telling the difference between a city whose kids test poorly because the schools serve a very deprived population and one whose kids are struggling for some reason we wouldn’t predict based on their backgrounds.
Kristin Blagg from the Urban Institute ran the numbers on this, using NAEP scores compiled by the Trial Urban District Assessment program and letting us see how 21 major cities stack up with and without adjustments…