Here's How Chicago School District Ranks: 24/7 Wall Street

By Samuel Stebbins, 24/7 Wall St. - Chicago

2021-07-24

Every child is born to a unique set of circumstances. And it is these different social, familial, economic, environmental, and many other factors, that help shape who they become. While these conditions are countless, a handful of factors play an outsized role in a child’s development and likelihood for future success — including academic success.

Whether or not a child succeeds academically can depend considerably on school quality. A student who falls behind in one school district might have excelled academically in another. By no means limited to the classroom, many of the strongest influences on a child’s future are in the home environment, and the resources available or absent there.

The Prairie Hills Elementary School District 144, located just outside of Chicago, enrolls just under 3,000 students in grades PK-8. With a child poverty rate of 31.6%, the district ranks as having the worst conditions in the state for children’s academic success. Students in Prairie Hills are more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line as the typical student in Illinois as a whole, putting them at a possible considerable disadvantage academically as poverty can be a hurdle to academic success.

Class sizes are also larger than average in the district, with an average of 20 students per teacher — 25% more than the comparable average across the state.

The four measures used to determine the worst school district in every state are: the child poverty rate, the teacher-to-student ratio, per-pupil spending, and the share of adults with a college education. All data came from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics. This is the worst school district in every state.

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This story was originally published by 24/7 Wall St., a news organization that produces real-time business commentary and data-driven reporting for state and local markets across the country.