Giving Compass' Take:

• Charter School Deserts: High-Poverty Neighborhoods with Limited Educational Options maps out areas in states with charter school laws where poverty and a lack of school choice coincide. 

• Why haven't charter school laws created schools in these high-need areas? How can laws be changed to increase the areas where students have school choice options? 

• Learn how one charter school network is expanding. 

Poverty in America hasn’t just grown over the past 20 years, it has overflowed city lines. The suburban poor accounted for near half of the nation’s increase between 2000-2015, with more people in poverty now living in suburbs than cities.

With charter school expansion stalled, a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that part of the explanation may be that demand for charters has been largely satisfied in poor urban areas where these schools have long been concentrated.

Focusing on the 42 states that have laws permitting charter schools, the report calls locations where three adjoining tracts have at least a 20 percent poverty rate and no charter elementary schools “charter school deserts” — also the buzzy title of the 130-page report (full title: Charter School Deserts: High-Poverty Neighborhoods with Limited Educational Options).

Fordham supplemented the text with an interactive map and websitethat allows users to zoom in on any of the more than 73,000 census tracts in the United States.

Saultz found that, as expected, charters are “overwhelmingly” located in and around cities. A total of 39 of the 42 states had charter deserts, ranging from one in Alaska (because most of the country’s largest state is uninhabited) to 34 in Ohio.

Read the full article about charter deserts by David Cantor at The 74.