Transportation
Is There a Link Between Walkability and Local School Performance?
Some early attempts to map the question in D.C. suggest that there might be. But what does the correlation tell us?
Public and charter schools in the District of Columbia are now classified into one of five accountability categories, all with equally uplifting names: reward, rising, developing, focus and priority (the "reward" schools are the top performers, although one might want to try to reward improvement from the struggling ones). The index is built on measurable data like test scores, enrollment growth, attendance and graduation rates, and it offers the simplest shorthand parents can use to make the weighty decision about where to send their kids to school.
Plot all of the schools on one map, by accountability level, and the city looks like this (public schools are denoted with circles and charters with triangles):