That children in Bakersfield, California and Boston, Massachusetts face very different opportunity should be a cause for concern. But perhaps more striking are the inequities in opportunity within metro areas. In many metro areas, the difference between their lowest and highest opportunity neighborhoods is as wide as the difference between very low- and very high-opportunity neighborhoods across the entire nation.
To measure the difference in conditions that children experience, we look at the Child Opportunity Score by opportunity level. This allows us to compare very low-opportunity neighborhoods between metro areas. A child living in a very low-opportunity neighborhood in Milwaukee with a score of only 4 experiences much worse conditions than a child in a very low-opportunity neighborhood in Austin with a score of 24.
Use this tool below to explore the wide variation in scores by opportunity level between metro areas.

Issue Areas
- Children and Youth
Publishers
- Institute for Child, Youth & Family Policy (ICYFP), Heller School For Social Policy & Management at Brandeis University
Funder
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Doc Type
- Dataset
- Interactive Resource
Language
- English
Geography
- North America / United States
Copyright
- Copyright 2019 by Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. All rights reserved.