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Non-profit investigative newsroom ProPublica has released an interactive tool that makes it easy for people to compare schools to others in their district, state or the U.S.
To create the tool, the newsroom analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, which tracks Advanced Placement, gifted and talented programs, and advanced math and science classes.
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It also used data from the National Center for Education Statistics to determine the percentage of students in each school who receive free or reduced-price lunches -- an indicator used to estimate poverty in schools.
"While we found some relationship between the proportion of minority students at schools and access to programs," explains an article about the project's methodology. "We found the strongest relationship with the percent of students getting free- reduced-price lunches."
In some states, an increase in the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches actually coincided with a drop in the percentage of students taking AP courses. Many states in which this was not the case had instated programs that provide evening access to high-level courses.
You can use ProPublica's interactive tool to see how your city's schools (provided they have more than 3,000 students) stack up against others in its district and state, or against schools nearby with low and high poverty levels.
Each school's profile shows its percentage of inexperienced teachers, number of AP courses offered, percentage of students who get free or reduced-price lunch, percentage of students who take advanced math and percentage of students who take at least one AP course.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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