Click on the dots to see how well schools' third-grade reading scores compare with those in the rest of their district, or enter the name of a location in the search box at top right.
For more information on this project, click the About This Map button in the top left corner or read our full analysis here.⇢
As poverty rates rise, reading proficiency rates tend to fall. But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform what might be expected of them based solely on which students they serve.
We calculated each state’s expected reading proficiency rate, based on its local poverty rate, and compared that to its actual third grade reading scores. This methodology helped us identify schools that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read.
The data for this project come from two sources. Spring 2024 third-grade reading scores were downloaded from the , which compiles state test scores and makes them publicly available. The 2023-24 poverty data comes from the Common Core of Data from the National Center for Education Statistics. These numbers are reported by states to the federal government, but they may look different than the measures that states or districts use for their own purposes.
States use and report different metrics, so we looked at both free- and reduced-price lunch rates and the actual number of students who qualify, based on their family’s participation in one or more means-tested federal relief programs. Because we were looking for positive outliers, we gave schools the benefit of the doubt and took the higher of these two figures.
The most likely reason is sample size. We've included only schools with at least 30 students who took their state's spring 2024 third grade English Language Arts test. The only exception was Maine, which did not break its results down by grade level, so its numbers are an aggregate across grades 3 to 8. All told, we had data for 41,883 schools serving 3,162,225 students across 10,414 districts.
Because different states use different exams, we encourage readers to focus on within-state comparisons.