Read a letter from Mayor Vincent Gray^[pdf]

The Deputy Mayor for Education commissioned the Public Policy and Research Department of IFF, an expert in school quality issues, to conduct an analysis of the geography of school quality in the District of Columbia. This is a supply and demand analysis and at the heart of this study, Quality Schools: Every Child, Every School, Every Neighborhood^[pdf], is the question, “What neighborhoods in the District of Columbia have the greatest need for performing seats?”

We used 39 neighborhood clusters that were developed by the DC Office of Planning for community planning purposes and are approximate representations of the neighborhoods contained within them. All enrollment, capacity, and grade ranges listed are from the 2010-2011 school year, the year for which these schools were analyzed. DCPS and Charter school performance tiers are listed separately in the legend below only for clarification of map symbology. They were analyzed together in the IFF needs assessment.

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View the full report^[pdf] (10MB)

Definitions

• DCPS Demand is the number of students living in a cluster that attend a DCPS school.
• Charter Demand is the number of students living in a cluster that attend a Charter school.
• Service Level is the percent of students that can be served by performing seats, capacity, of Tier 1 schools.
• Service Gap is the difference between the number of students enrolled in the system (demand) and the performing seats, capacity, of Tier 1 schools (supply). A negative service gap indicates a surplus of performing seats.
• Performance Tier is the quartile into which a school falls when compared against all other schools' performance means (see Research Methodology in the report for more information).
• Non-Analysis Schools are those that had insufficient test data, and therefore could not be included in the performance analysis. These schools include those without test grades in 2011 or schools with fewer than three years of performance data (see Research Methodology in the report for more information). These schools have a "0" listed as their performance tier.
• Many charter schools have multiple campuses but report one enrollment ceiling for the whole program. Capacity for these schools was divided proportionally across the campuses based on enrollment.
• A "0" listed for enrollment and/or capacity for a Non-Analysis School indicates that limited data was available for this school.