When asked to name the school districts that provide the best math education, people might think of wealthy enclaves like Scarsdale, New York; tech hubs in California’s Silicon Valley; or college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Few of them would think of Neshoba County, Mississippi.
But Neshoba County schools do something those other places don’t: They serve a high-poverty community, yet their students’ math scores are competitive with those in wealthier areas.
In September, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, director of arts and technology at The 74, to find districts across the country that could best help children learn to read proficiently by third grade. Today we use the same approach for eighth grade math. We calculated each district’s expected math proficiency, based on its local poverty level, and compared that to actual scores. This methodology helped us identify districts that are beating the odds in math.
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Nationally, eighth-grade math scores peaked in 2013, dropped leading up to the pandemic, and dropped dramatically afterward. The declines were especially large for students who were already among the lowest performing.
Mississippi has weathered these declines better than most states. As a result, the Urban Institute found that Mississippi has risen in the state rankings in both math and reading over the past decade. After controlling for student demographics, Mississippi was ahead of 40 other states in 2019, and its scores rebounded faster than other states post-COVID.
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Neshoba County helped lead that increase. Neshoba students went from scoring more than half a grade level below the national average in 2016 to nearly 1.5 grade levels above the national average last year, according to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Their students made gains even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When we started looking for districts that exceeded the odds, we wanted to find and celebrate districts like Neshoba. Ultimately, we identified nearly 600 districts achieving exceptional results in math, which we determined significantly exceeded their expected eighth-grade proficiency rate.
Some districts show strong performance in third-grade reading and eighth-grade math. For example, in the Reading Project, we placed Steubenville City, Ohio at the top of our rankings. Despite relatively high poverty, 81% of eighth graders score as proficient in math, putting the nation on par with districts that have far fewer disadvantaged students.
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States set their skill limits at different levels, and Maryland has one of the highest limits. And yet students in Worcester, a community with neither high nor low poverty, stand out for their eighth-grade math proficiency that is 20 points higher than that of children in any other district in the state.
In Michigan, Dearborn City achieves the same results as other counties with much lower poverty rates.
Other strong outliers include places like Genoa Central in Arkansas, Lake Washington in Washington state, the Fossil School District in Oregon and the Murray Independent district in Kentucky.
In Northern Virginia, where I live, people often say they move here for the schools. But if they were really looking for the best school system in the state, they would move to Wise County, on the Kentucky border. Wise County has much higher poverty rates than DC’s better-known suburbs, yet topped our Virginia rankings in reading and math.
By looking at scores in this way, we can identify places with good school systems, where learning gains are determined by what students learn in class. This is especially true for math, because unlike reading skills – which are closely linked to language skills and background knowledge that children acquire at home – math scores are more directly linked to education at school.
This goes to the heart of the problem at hand. Parents and policy makers should not be content with answering the simple question: “Where do students perform best?” Wealthy communities are likely to look good by that measure, if only because of the nature of the students they serve.
Instead, policymakers should try to find schools and districts that help all students learn, regardless of their income level. Poverty is certainly predictive of school performance, but does not necessarily have to be decisive.
Note: See us previously for more details on the data sources and methodology for this project reading analysis.
