Giving Compass' Take:

• The Educational Equality Index measures how effectively schools are teaching low-income students. The report found that Texas city schools were the top performers. 

• How can this help with improvements for the schools that are not effective in teaching low-income students?

• Read about the generation of high-performing, low-income students getting lost in school systems. 

Texas cities were top performers on a measure designed to compare how well schools in the nation’s 300 largest cities are teaching their poorest students. The study’s authors surveyed a variety of test results from low-income students in those cities, and used them to create a measurement called the Educational Equality Index. The index assigns a score to each school and each city based on how effectively it teaches low-income students.

The authors caution that they can only hypothesize about why some schools and cities have done better than others. Further study is required. But local leaders from Brownsville quoted in the report mention the heavy presence of homegrown teachers, and strong networks of social services as possible reasons for their city’s success.

  • Top-performing cities in the report were generally mid-sized and concentrated in Texas
  • The majority of schools with the the best results for low-income students were clustered in large cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
  • The report highlighted the continued gap between low-income and wealthier students.

Read the full analysis in the article educational equality index by Mike Elsen-Rooney at The Hechinger Report.