The Demographic Shift Index measures how much a school’s racial and ethnic makeup changed between two chosen years. It takes each group’s share of students in each year, adds up the size of the change in every group’s share, and halves the total — a single distance from 0 (no change) to 100 (a complete turnover). Enrollment size does not mechanically drive a share-based score, but a few students can move the shares much more sharply in a small school; use the minimum-enrollment filter and enrollment context. It shows how much a school changed, but not what drove the change: construction or rezoning, policy, migration, and the like. How it’s calculated, with examples →
NJ shift rank measures the amount of compositional change, not school quality. Level and minimum enrollment define the statewide ranking pool; school, district, and county searches narrow the rows shown without recalculating rank.
Reading this. The index is directionless — it measures how much a school’s makeup changed between the two chosen years, not which way; the dot’s color marks the group that grew most, and the figures at right give every group’s change. NJ shift rank is each school’s position by shift within the chosen level and minimum size, computed statewide; searching or picking a county narrows what’s shown without renumbering. Pre-2006 pairs use five reported categories and later pairs use seven; a pair crossing that boundary is not calculated. Source blanks become mathematical zeros only when the other exhaustive categories reconcile exactly to enrollment, and details mark that derivation. For the full method — which race groups are used, the 2006-07 category change, what counts as an “Elementary” peer, and what the index can’t tell you — see how the Shift Index works and the data explainer.
