How Districts Were Chosen

Overview

This year marks a transition.  Now that the federal pandemic relief dollars have been spent, we have removed “Recovery” from our name to become the Education Scorecard.  This year’s analysis shifts from pandemic recovery to a more forward-looking approach focused on identifying “districts on the rise.” For more information on the methodology on the district-level educational outcomes click here.

Districts on the Rise (2026)

To be considered as a “district on the rise”, a district must meet the following criteria:

• Enrollment of more than 1,200 students in grades 3–8. Unfortunately, with very small districts (fewer than 1,200 students), it is impossible to distinguish real improvements from chance fluctuations from year to year due to shifts in the specific students taking the test
• Valid achievement estimates available for 2019, 2022, and 2025
• A comparison group of at least four similar districts, each with valid estimates for 2019, 2022, and 2025

To ensure that any changes in achievement are not driven by demographic changes within the district, the percentage change in grades 3–8 enrollment and the percentage change in students eligible for federal free lunch from 2022 to 2025 must both be no more than 10 percentage points greater than the average percent change among similar districts.  Among the eligible districts, we then construct a measure of the change in math or reading achievement minus the change in similar districts in the same state. We measure this differential improvement relative to similar districts for the periods 2022 to 2025 and 2019 to 2025 and apply the following criteria:

• The change from 2022 to 2025 must be positive (i.e. student achievement in the district must have improved in the wake of the pandemic)
• The minimum of both 2022 to 2025 and 2019 to 2025 differential improvement is at least 0.3 grade levels
• OR the minimum of both 2022 to 2025 and 2019 to 2025 growth is in the top 5 districts within that state and subject

Our focus on improvement between 2019 to 2025 as well as 2022 to 2025 ensures that recognized districts have not simply bounced back from an unusually steep pandemic decline but have demonstrated sustained improvement outpacing their peers across a six-year window.

What “similar districts” means

The “similar districts” are chosen based on the following district characteristics, averaged over 2022-2025, as reported in the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA):

1. the log of the average grade-level enrollment in grades 3 to 8;
2. the average proportion of students receiving federal subsidized lunches;
3. the average proportions of students who identify as Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White in the district;
4. the average proportions of students in urban schools, in suburban schools, and in town schools; and,
5. the average socioeconomic status (SES) of families in the district, where SES is measured using a composite index based on median family income, proportion of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, proportion of adults that are unemployed, the household poverty rate, the proportion of households receiving SNAP benefits, and the proportion of households with children that are headed by a single mother. 

The set of similar districts are those in the same state as the focal district that are most similar (closest in Mahalanobis distance) to it on these 5 dimensions.