Long Island children have more opportunities than NYC children
In our last post on this topic, we looked into how Long Island children have differing levels of opportunity. We highly recommend that post as it provides a more detailed what “Child Opportunity Scores (COS)” and “Child Opportunity Levels (COL)” are, and how unequal Long Island is.
The gist: The opportunity level measures the quality of resources and conditions for a child to grow up in a healthy way. The higher the number or level, the better it is for the child.
New York City
There is a large opportunity gap between different areas in New York City. Compared to the rest of the nation, New York City has both areas that have the lowest opportunity score (1) for children and the highest as well (100).
Long Island, if you missed it, is barely better with a low score of 11 and a high score of 98.
But what happens when we normalize* and compare NYC to Long Island?
Long Island vs NYC
Overall, Long Island overwhelmingly offers its children far higher opportunity levels than New York City does.
The median Long Island child opportunity score is 80, which translates to a “high opportunity level.” Meanwhile, NYC’s median score is 46 or “moderate opportunity level.”
The map we embedded below also shows the stark difference between Long Island and NYC.
We narrowed the data to Long Island census tracts, and calculated the weighted percentiles for each tract using the national, overall Child Opportunity Scores of the tracts with the population as its weight.
For a detailed explanation of how and why, please refer to page 17 of the Child Opportunity Index’s technical documentation.
We replicated what they did with metro- and state-normalized scores, but with a tighter focus to be more relevant for our readers.