Justice
A Discouraging Portrait of America's Urban Public Schools
The report card for public and charter schools in 50 U.S. cities shows room for improvement.
Researchers have examined the inequities between city schools districts and also evaluated the performance of urban charter schools. What they haven’t been able to do is a take a comprehensive city-by-city look at public and charter schools together—until now.
“If you're a city leader—a mayor or some other community leader—it's hard to gauge the overall health of the city schools. That can make it hard to frame where the city's doing well, and where it needs to do better,” says Michael DeArmond, senior analyst at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, and lead author of CRPE’s new study that seeks to plug this hole in education data.