Thanks to Michigans robust school-choice policies, Detroits roughly 100,000 public-school students are widely dispersed across a mix of charters, traditional neighborhood schools, and application schools that select their students.
But efforts to understand how school and student performance compares across these categories have been snarled by a surprisingly hard-to-answer question: Which schools have the highest concentration of the poorest students the ones who are at the greatest disadvantage before they enter the classroom?
A growing line of research aims to tackle that question, taking a closer look at family income data to uncover significant differences among students whose families fit the broad criteria for economic disadvantage. One such study found that the Detroit Public Schools Community Districts neighborhood schools have higher proportions of students in deep poverty, compared with the citys charter schools and application schools.
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