Sites by Child Opportunity Index

Where children live and how much access they have to opportunities have an enormous effect on the quality of their experiences, their health and education, their future prospects, and their success as adults. The Child Opportunity Index 3.0 was created by diversitydatakids.org to reflect opportunities available to children in neighborhoods across the United States. The index consists of three domains:

• Education: third-grade reading and math test scores, high school graduation rates, and similar metrics
• Health and environment: air pollution levels, healthy food outlets, green spaces, and the like
• Social and economic factors: number of adults with high-skill jobs, levels of adult employment and of home ownership, poverty rates, etc.

Each neighbor/census tract receives a score for each of the three domains. The three are combined to produce the composite Child Opportunity Index, in five levels ranging from very low to very high opportunity as compared to the state averages.

In Michigan, 2021 Child Opportunity Index scores were available for 2,939 census tracts defined in 2020. This map shows how the Child Opportunity Index of each census tract compares to the state average. Dots show the locations of GSRP sites; triangles represent Head Start sites. The reason that Head Start sites were mapped in addition to GSRP sites was to make sure that we had a fuller picture of preschool coverage, because an area with an extremely low Child Opportunity Index may be served by Head Start rather than by GSRP.