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Giving Compass' Take:
• Marcus A. Winters offers insights into how much school quality varies within cities, quantifying a known phenomenon.
• How much does school quality vary in your area? How can funders work to ensure that all students get the same opportunities to thrive?
• Learn about America's racial school funding gap.
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. For parents in those school districts, the only way to improve their children’s situation is to move elsewhere or enroll their kids in private school.
In other cities, such as Washington, D.C., median quality is low, but there are high-quality exceptions. Parents in such school districts face the task of doing what it takes to enroll their children in the limited number of decent schools. And there are cities, such as San Francisco, where median quality is relatively high but where there are many low performers, too. Parents in those school districts should avoid having their children, in effect, draw the short straw.
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. 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.
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 (as defined below). Several cities, however, including New York and San Francisco, exhibit substantially wider school-quality gaps.