On the Community Stress Index, the word "stress" indicates challenge or systemic strain that might impose itself on community members and factors institutions must consider in attempting to serve that community effectively. In this case, a high score indicates that the community faces more challenge from the data or data category identified.  The primary/domain fields populated in the Community Stress Index are Economics, Education, Health, Housing and Crime.   Within each of those domains are a series of data points/indicators that correlate to the domain.  Please see the Information Section of the User Guide for more details.

The higher the score, the greater the indication that members of the community are adversely impacted. High scores on the Community Stress Index are indicative of greater stress. For example, a community with a high score in the domain of “Economics” indicates that the area searched is under greater economic strain than a community exhibiting a low score.

No, for schools that have open enrollment without school attendance boundaries, we are not able to provide the data at that level. However, our collaborators at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management describe in the user guide how calculations were done in the absence of a school attendance boundary. Please see Data Assembly Section in User Guide for more information.

The intent behind the Community Stress Index was to develop a tool that could drill down to the high school level nationally, making it as widely usable as possible. The index provides information on over 23,000 high schools nationwide, as listed by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES).

All schools identified by NCES are public high schools; for the purpose of this Index this includes magnet schools, charter schools, and traditional public high schools.

Data are pulled from multiple sources and is fully documented in the User Guide, but sources include Bureau of Labor and Statics; US Census Bureau; County Health Rankings; City Health Dashboard; and Vera Institute. For more details, please see the Community Stress Index User Guide.

No, all domains are weighted evenly using the formula:

The Community Stress Index uses data from multiple open data sources, including the American Community Survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau. More detail is provided in the User Guide, and we do acknowledge systemic issues that come with relying solely on census tract data. However, data from the U.S. Census Bureau is valuable for the purposes of the Community Stress Index because we wanted the index to be able to drill down to individual tracts and provide the user with information on multiple stressors in the area immediately surrounding schools throughout the country. We fully acknowledge that minorities are systematically undercounted in the American Community Survey data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Community Stress Index is not conveying population-based statistics, but hyper-localized, tract-level characteristics of an area around a given school. Put differently, census tracts are small and homogeneous in their data makeup, and their data tend to accurately represent the characteristics of each individual tract. Since the Community Stress Index does not aggregate a large number of tracts together to make assertions about population-based statistics, the systematic bias often accompanying census data is significantly reduced because we are interested in tract-level characteristics.

We envision the index being used in multiple ways to help address complex problems facing our country. We built the tool with researchers, individuals responsible for resource allocation, education leaders, and philanthropists in mind and with the understanding that information on multiple community stressors is needed to better gauge success, especially in the context of educational impact. Below are a few quick use cases that our team was thinking about, as we developed this work:

a. Provide insight for individual leaders to facilitate better community service. b. Allow philanthropic users to align investment priorities with the intended spectrum area of need. c. Facilitate richer impact stories that are based in community data. d. Facilitate the identification of new areas where philanthropic groups and businesses may want to become involved. e. Facilitate the identification of work-based learning initiatives or other targeted programs addressing community need.

† = more than 3 data points missing * = score of higher than 0.5 on the Gini Index

Since seven of the variables contributing to the Community Stress Index are collected at the county level, we wanted to include a county-level indicator of wealth inequality, which is the information the Gini Index conveys. This is important, supplementary information because individual counties throughout the United States can have high levels of income inequality. Therefore, interpretation of the Community Stress Index, which conveys stress at the census tract level, is enriched by further consideration of income inequality at the county level. For example, consider an individual county with high income inequality, meaning the county contains some very affluent communities and some under-invested in communities. By having information on the income inequality on the county, this will help the user further contextualize the results of the individual communities returned by the Community Stress Index.

The results for the whole index or just a searchable section can be downloaded and further analyzed offline. There is a “download” button in the upper right-hand corner of the tool.

Please see User Guide for more information

The numbers in the “Domain Totals” as well as the “Composite Score” columns are the main data points of the Community Stress Index. These numbers are always on a scale from 1-100, with higher scores indicating more community stress. If you hover your mouse over a score, you will also find the median score associated with that variable, as well as the percentile rank of the score you are hovering over. This provides further context to help the user contextualize results. For example, if an individual is looking at a score in the “Education” domain of 76, this is associated with a median score of 30 and a percentile rank of 98. This means that one-half the scores in the “Education” domain are above 30 (Median) and one-half are below 30. Furthermore, the 98th percentile (out of 100) indicates that a score of 76 in the education domain is very close to the highest stress score returned by any school in the "Education" domain.

Missing data were handled differently, when calculating the Community Stress Index, depending on each indicator. In all cases, however, the calculation of the composite score and the domain totals had to be adjusted and more weight is given to the data that was not missing in these cases. For a more detailed explanation, see the user guide – see notes on each indicator for missingness and under index calculation in the User Guide.

Yes! This index was built to serve our own need at NAF to have smarter solutions for understanding the dimensions of data available for communities we serve. But we know that we’re not the only organization who can benefit, and our goal is to share what we’ve created understanding that the goal to strengthen every community through mission-driven work like ours is a collective effort. Share the tool using the CSI link here or try one of the canned posts below for your social media. NAF has accounts on

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Our handle is @NAFCareerAcads and our hashtag is #BeFutureReady.