How much are students improving in your school district?

A new study that examines educational progress of millions of U.S. pupils over a five-year span finds that there are few patterns for predicting how geography or socio-economic status affect student improvement.Rural school districts don’t seem to do much better or worse than urban districts in raising student test scores over time. And both poor districts and rich districts have good and bad results. (The only exception is the generally good results in Tennessee.)The massive study by Stanford University professor Sean Reardon looks at standardized test scores of students in the third grade and again, five years later, when that same year of students reaches the eighth grade. The difference in test scores from third to eighth grade shows how much the student performance in U.S. school districts improved over the five-year period.