By 2033, over 5,000 City of Poughkeepsie young people and their families will be connected annually to transformative cradle-to-career opportunities that place them on pathways to postsecondary completion and socioeconomic mobility.
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Our North Star
Our community dashboard below tracks education and household outcomes across the cradle-to-career continuum that help us measure progress and align on initiatives to reach our North Star.
🔎Browse through our Education & Household Outcomes by using the top navigating links
Dashboard built & maintained by North Arrow
Why a Community Dashboard?
We believe a community dashboard is a starting point to align residents, local government, the school district, nonprofits, philanthropy and business partners around a common purpose: long-term success for young people. This looks like meaningful, thriving wage jobs that provide stable housing and incomes sufficient to provide individuals and families with reliable transportation, nutritious food, and community security.
Yet, achieving long-term outcomes for students does not happen in a vacuum and should not be left up to schools alone. Eighty percent of children’s waking hours in a year are spent outside of school*. Neighborhoods —and the levels of health and economic stability they provide —matter. Race, zip code, and socioeconomic status continue to be the leading determinants of educational attainment, career success and intergenerational wealth in the United States — and those same factors are at play in the City of Poughkeepsie.
Our dashboard highlights this ironclad correlation between socioeconomic status and educational attainment by tracking both education and household outcomes, disaggregated by race. In addition to tracking education outcomes across the cradle-to-career continuum like 3rd-grade reading and postsecondary completion, we also track household income, food insecurity, housing insecurity, child poverty and life expectancy.
We believe tracking cross-sector outcomes will lead us to cross-sector solutions. Through transparent and accessible data sharing, we can set common goals and collectively advocate for policies that achieve our vision for all young people and families to thrive, inside and outside of school.
Zooming out: Place Matters
Our dashboard highlights how place impacts an individual’s life outcomes. Disparities in outcomes exist not only as a snapshot in time, but also limit socioeconomic mobility (the ability of a child to earn more in adulthood than the income of their family of origin).
The City of Poughkeepsie has a history of geographic segregation through redlining*, a discriminatory housing practice that denied loans and services to people based on race. This was exacerbated by the creation of the east-west arterial roadways built as part of the federal urban renewal program in the 1950s and 60s**.
The extent to which place, with its unique histories, continues to shape life outcomes is illuminated by data explored in the Opportunity Atlas, developed by the team at Opportunity Insights led by Professor Raj Chetty at Harvard University.
Let’s take the example of someone who grew up in a low-income household in one of Poughkeepsie’s poorest and most segregated census tracts, located in the Northside neighborhood. According to data from Opportunity Atlas, the median income they might earn as an adult is $21,000, on par with some of the worst neighborhoods in the US for intergenerational mobility. Let’s say instead, they grew up in a low-income household in the neighboring Town of Poughkeepsie’s Arlington neighborhood. The median income they might earn as an adult is now $29,000, an $8,000 increase.
The gap is even wider when considering factors like race and gender. Black males who grew up in low-income households in the Northside neighborhood of Poughkeepsie have a median income of $14,000 as adults. Comparatively, black men who grew up in low-income households in the neighboring Arlington neighborhood have a median income of $30,000 as adults, a more than 2x increase. This is on-par with some of the best neighborhoods in the US for intergenerational mobility for low-income black males.
This story is not unique to Poughkeepsie alone. Across the United States, historic patterns of disinvestment in neighborhoods contribute to poorer outcomes for residents later in life compared to those who grew up in better-resourced neighborhoods.
* University of Richmond - Mapping Inequality
** Harvard University - Fringe Cities and Urban Renewal
So, what can we do?
Knowing the impact of place helps us focus our efforts on neighborhood-level solutions that address the out-of-school factors that impact students' learning and ability to thrive. These factors can start even before birth. High quality prenatal care for expecting parents, affordable and stable housing, and thriving wages all create a foundation for economic security and educational attainment.
Taking a collective impact approach, The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet will utilize our dashboard to understand these interconnections and push for community and systems-level change towards these goals.