ZIP Code DestinyGrowing up5 of 19

Scene 5 of 19, Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts. Step 1 of 2, Counties by income.

Counties, then school districts

Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts

Average achievement is higher in counties with higher median household income, a correlation of +0.59 with log income across 2,999 counties

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Scenes

Where the comparison starts

  1. Life expectancy falls with each step toward more deprived neighborhoods
  2. Inside each New York borough, neighborhoods differ widely in life expectancy
  3. Home values set most of the deprivation ranking

Growing up

  1. Babies in more deprived counties are more often born small or early
  2. Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts
  3. Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes
  4. Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry

Adult life

  1. Where local jobs are scarce, residents hold better-paid jobs than the county offers
  2. Whether rent burden rises with deprivation depends on the comparison
  3. More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county
  4. Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age
  5. Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs
  6. People rate their lives lowest in midlife, while stress declines with age

Reading the patterns

  1. The most deprived places usually stand farther from the national value than the least deprived
  2. Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy
  3. Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them
  4. Neighborhood types line up on outcomes but blur into one another
  5. Mobility beyond what census measures predict clusters by region
  6. These comparisons describe places, not what moving would do

Read the bookExplore the figuresMethods

Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts

Scene 5 of 19, step 1 of 2: Counties by income. Counties, then school districts.

What to say

Say aloud that the unit and the measure change between the two steps. The spread bars are the interquartile range of districts; the wider view in the chapter is the 5th to 95th percentile of districts, a spread and not an interval.

About the chart

Average achievement is higher in counties with higher median household income, a correlation of +0.59 with log income across 2,999 counties

Dots drift up from left to right, and the marker for the highest tenth of counties by income lies above the marker for the lowest tenth. The cloud is wide: the standard deviation of county averages around the income line is 0.63 grade levels. Markers plot weighted mean achievement within tenths of counties by income, with 95% intervals from a bootstrap over states; the line through all counties has slope 1.28 grade levels per doubling of income.

  • Income is the Census Bureau's modeled estimate of county median household income for 2022 as County Health Rankings reports it. Test results are for 2009 to 2019, so a county's income stands in for its income during the test years. One county, Valdez-Cordova in Alaska, has no income in that file and is left out.
  • Intervals resample whole states, because counties in a state resemble one another and share state tests and school funding rules. Counting each county once instead of weighting by tests gives a slope within the interval.
  • Forsyth County, Georgia, and Kusilvak Census Area, Alaska, are labeled as the counties with the highest and lowest averages.

Source

Stanford Education Data Archive 6.0, 2009-2019, and County Health Rankings 2024 (Census SAIPE median household income for 2022); weighted by tests counted, modeled estimates

Open in Chapter 3.1, Test scores, class and raceThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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