Throughout American history, the policies and practices that create opportunity gaps at birth have been baked into the ecosystem of local and state institutions.

It is well documented that many of these policies and practices were rooted in implicit racial bias at best, and explicit racism and hate at worst. Even today, far too often the policies and practices that govern how cities manage and resource housing, education, healthcare, transportation, workforce development, criminal justice, and civic engagement reinforce inequity in outcomes for children and families of color compared to their white peers by creating a system of barriers to success across all facets of a child’s living and learning environments.

Certainly, it is impossible to create loving systems without changing that fundamental underpinning.

To address racial disparities in learning outcomes and provide equal opportunity, we must replace racially biased policies with practices that institutionalize love and support for all children.

The Loving Cities Index is a tool and framework that provides a comprehensive analysis of local systems of love and support. The Index framework draws from the wisdom of communities and a large body of evidence-based research to identify 25 indicators that represent the supports needed for children to have the opportunity to learn and achieve success in their careers, families, and lives.

Each indicator reflects key city policies and practices needed to provide all children with care, stability, commitment, and capacity. The Schott Foundation believes that, by prioritizing these measures, over time cities can significantly accelerate educational outcomes, particularly for students of color.

The Schott Foundation and research partners have studied 35 cities so far using the Loving Cities Index to assess the systems of love and support in place at the local and state levels to provide children with an opportunity to learn. Fifteen cities are profiled in this 2025 report, and the 2020 and 2018 reports each profiled ten cities.

For each city, researchers collected publicly available data collected consistently across the country and scored the city against 25 indicators of love and support. For each indicator, a city can earn up to three points for levels of access to that support. When data disaggregated by race and ethnicity is available, equity in access across racial groups is also measured and included. We recognize that opportunity gaps are impacted by more than just race/ethnicity: city, state, and federal policymakers should be collecting and analyzing data by gender, sexuality, and other intersectional identities that tell a deeper story of access and equity.

Unfortunately, much of the national datasets that we used for this report did not include data disaggregated by both race and gender, and many localities are not collecting and reporting data at this level. Sexuality is often missing completely from disaggregated data at all levels.

We consistently see alarming disparities in access to resources in each city, reflecting major opportunity gaps based on race. While in each city there may be some policies and practices in place to provide access to some critical supports, every city studied has significant gaps in delivering the full system of supports that were needed for all children to thrive.

We must replace systems of oppression with systems that institutionalize love and support. We hope the Loving Cities Index profile can be a tool for local community advocates that work tirelessly to advance an agenda of love and support for all children. We hope funders will use a cross-sector framework like Loving Cities to inform their grantmaking and expand beyond traditional issue silos. And we hope that city and state leaders will work in partnership with communities of color to truly meet the promise of equity and justice for all.