In general, a school with a lower poverty rate is going to have higher test scores than one that serves a more disadvantaged group of students.
But that may or may not be due to anything the schools themselves are doing. And poverty is not destiny; around the country, schools are bucking that general trend.
Last year, we set out to find the schools that were doing much better at teaching third graders to read than their poverty levels might predict. After looking at data for nearly 42,000 schools, we identified 2,158 that we called Bright Spots. While these schools didn’t always have the highest absolute scores, their students performed much better than might be expected, based on their poverty rates.