Learn more about the gap in education quality both across the US and within King County, WA
Through our final project, we hope to map the disparities between education opportunities within the United States. Inspired by author, Jonathan Kozol’s work Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, we understand that there are differences in fundings for neighborhoods with residents with higher income versus residents with lower income. This contrast led to a huge gap in the quality of education in public schools. The essential resources such as infrastructures, good teachers, or living environments were not equally shared among these public schools when they should have been as they are key factors necessary to equip a child with knowledge and quality assistance. Our team’s goal is to produce a timeline of the average funding each student from each state received from 1993 to 2016 to show how situations were improved or worsened with spatial patterns. Also, we will also show the average reading and mathematical scores of each state along with race and population factors within each period of time.
Demonstrating how living in one location in one’s childhood will impact his or her entire life due to the financial status or the funding from local government to the public school system is the vital factor that highlights the significance of our project. However, our project is not intended to point fingers and create a person or entity to blame. Rather, we want to show the milestones of improvements in each area with our map and give potential advice on the reallocation of public school resources from the federal government.
The Map of Education and Investment explores income and investment in public high schools through a collection of choropleth maps dated 2005 to 2015. The map data is filtered by the categories of “Money on Students”, “Enrollment”, “Instruction Expenditure”, and “Federal Revenue”. By displaying the progress (or lack thereof) of schools over time, we begin to paint a picture of how school is valued through the lens of money. How much is spent? Where? This leads us to the Map of Academic Achievement, where we delve into academic performance by state.
From the map, we can see how the number of students were concentrated in the States such as TX, CA, NY, FL, and IL. When these states were also the states with the most federal revenue and instruction expedeniture, the money put on each students was higher in the northern states. Even the charts of median values show a constant growth on the money, the funds used on students from different states demonstrate that growth is limited in many states. In 2015, the last year of the data, there's still a 4 dollars to 16 dollars range
The Map of Academic Achievement tells the story of scores. Data is presented as a collection of choropleth maps dated 2005-2015, broken down by “Verbal SAT”, “Math SAT”, “Art GPA”, and “STEM GPA”. Paired now with the Map of Education and Investment, we can build a greater understanding of potential association between money and performance. Questions we could ask ourselves are: Where are students performing best/worst? Where are the most students getting poorer results on standardized testing?
We examined 2 different markers of academic achievement: GPA and SAT scores. Through the years, we see slow but linear growth in average GPA in both language arts fields (social science/history, art/music, english, and foreign languages) and STEM fields (natural science and math). This sign of improvement in the U.S. education system is wonderful, however, given the lack of standardization in how GPA is assigned across individual schools, let alone the entire nation, means that looking at a standardization method of achievement is needed in conjunction with GPA. When looking at SAT scores over the years, we don't see as clear of a pattern. 2005 marks the beginning of a new SAT: added writing section, possible score boost to 2400, and total test time of 3 hours and 45 minutes with no breaks. This test remains the same throughout our entire research period of 2005-2015, and yet interestingly, the percentage of people getting in the lower half of possible scores both on the verbal portion (now known as the Critical Reading portion) and the math portion was never as low as it was in 2005. Specifically looking at students who get these lower scores allows us to examine the performance of students at a more even level, since students in who score in the higher categories may be influenced by private tutors, aka factors that don't reflect on the quality of the education system in America. Even with this taken into account, there doesn't seem to be a too large of a direct connection between money spent on students and academic achievement (look at Wyoming vs New York), meaning that the education system in America isn't effective at preparing students in the metrics we examined.
The Map of Public School Distribution will use the location of each public school in King county to show the ditribution of schools in the area. We would also use the census tract Median Household Income data of the residents in King county as a choropleth map to analyze if it is a factor that palys a role in the educational inequality in the system. The goal of this map is to show the unequal distribution of public school resources and how that affects the academic achievement of the students to hook the audience's interest and simultaneously explore how income plays a role in the quality of education that students are receiving.
As it is evident in the map above, Eastern Washington is divided with residents earning a median household income ranging in between $41,000 to $120,000. On the other hand, Western Washington has a median household income that ranges from all the values given in the legend, from $0- $161,000.
It is observable that cities who earn higher on the scale also provide a higher number of AP courses which corresponds to the hypothesis that income is a major component of the education system and the quality of education that students receive. Meanwhile, cities who are earning an estimate of $41,000 to $80,000 have a lower count of courses. It is also important to note that there is a significant number of public schools that have not reported if they offer AP courses.
We listed our data sources and how we define them on the Project Github Page.
We used Alber projection to maximize the visualization on USA. During the data processing, Mapbox and D3 js helped us create the thematical maps and the data charts. And we used bootstrap for creating the index and about page.
We recognize the inherent biases of SAT scores as a reflection of education level. Students of a lower family income level tend to score lowest, whereas students of a higher family income level have much higher average scores. Disadvantage can mostly be attributed to test preparation, but may also have something to do with “stereotype threat”, where “reminding students of their racial group before taking a test can impact their score” (Elsesser, 2019). Additionally, at this point in time, points were deducted for incorrect answers. With this in mind, students took different approaches than others when it came to the exam that could affect performance. Therefore, while our data is sound, SAT scores themselves are not always reflective of a population and how they otherwise perform academically.