Giving Compass' Take:

• This report examines the quality of schools within cities, specifically looking at the gaps in variation of school performance between school districts in the same city.

• How can this information help donors focus on elevating school performance throughout one city and target a variety of school districts?

• Read about how to decipher school performance data and information.

School quality doesn’t vary only between cities; it varies within cities. All parents know this, of course, and seek to enroll their children in the best schools. But parents face different scenarios in different cities.

In some cities, it doesn’t really matter which public school one attends; variation in quality is limited. This can be good news if most schools are decent—the case in Arlington, Virginia, for example. But it can be bad news in cities where most schools are dreadful—the case in Birmingham, Alabama.

This paper quantifies such variation in elementary and middle school quality within 68 of the largest U.S. public school districts, which collectively serve about 7.8 million students. It also examines whether cities that see students with certain demographics (specifically, low-income and nonwhite) concentrated in certain schools experience higher variation in school quality.

In this paper, I find that the variation in school quality is fairly similar in America’s largest school districts, with a large plurality having a gap of 15–20 percentage points between good and bad schools. Several cities, however, including New York and San Francisco, exhibit substantially wider school-quality gaps.

The findings, especially those in the comprehensive Appendix table, can serve as a guide for parents, as well as an admonition to school officials in cities where quality is consistently low or where the quality gap between the best and worst schools is wide.

Read the full PDF about school quality within cities by Marcus A. Winters at the Manhattan Institute.