In 2020, the education research group Brightbeam compared student outcomes in the 12 most progressive and 12 most conservative cities and found these results: (1) “Overall, students in these cities “have roughly the same proficiency rates,” but black and Hispanic “students in America’s most progressive cities face greater racial inequity in achievement and graduation rates than students living in the nation’s most conservative cities.” (2) “We tried to explain it away, but we couldn’t. There are many factors that contribute to student success,” but “controlling for these factors did not erase the correlation between a city’s progressivism and the sizable racialized gaps in educational outcomes.” (3) Per-student “spending is actually much higher in most progressive cities.” (4) “Our research shows that there are U.S. cities where little to no gaps exist. Those cities happen to be conservative.”