NCES EDGE School Neighborhood Poverty Estimates

The EDGE School Neighborhood Poverty Estimates rely on household economic data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and public school point locations developed by NCES to estimate the income-to-poverty ratio for neighborhoods around school buildings. Unlike neighborhood poverty estimates created from survey responses collected for predefined geographic areas like census tracts, Spatially Interpolated Demographic Estimates (SIDE) predict conditions at specific point locations based on the survey responses nearest to those locations. This approach allows SIDE estimates to extract new value from existing data sources to provide indicators of neighborhood conditions. The economic conditions of school neighborhoods may be different from the economic conditions in neighborhoods where students live. However, the economic condition of the neighborhood around a school may impact schools, just as the condition of neighborhood schools may impact local neighborhoods. The school neighborhood poverty estimates provide an additional indicator to help identify these local conditions.