Chicago Public Schools Report Card
The Chicago Public Schools District releases an annual report detailing the student's accomplishments and performance of individual schools in Chicago. Although the reports are released annually, the reports now just show a couple of highlights about the entire performance of the district instead of a whole dataset detailing each school. The last available full report is from the 2011-2012 school year. In these academic report cards, various topics are covered about each school including the schools, academic performance, safety level, location, and parent involvement among many others. The report card is a tool that is utilized by parents, administrators, and the community to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the school to determine the best ways to improve the school for the children. Going into this analysis, the primary objective was to observe the relationship that community involvement/safety has to the success of students in schools. We wanted to see how strong the relationship between these two factors was and determine if any other factors were also correlated. The data that follows demonstrates that we believe there is a correlation between the safety levels at schools and their overall performance. Additionally, high schools and middle schools are on probation over 60% of the time compared to elementary schools which are on probation around 30% of the time. This means that high schools and middle schools are doing a significantly worse job meeting education standards compared to elementary schools It is crucial to understand this data and these relationships because education is the most important thing for children and we can help them get the most out of their education by putting the necessary resources in their schools.
Schools Levels in Chicago:
This visualization demonstrates that in our dataset a vast majority of our data comes from elementary schools. Elementary schools make up 462 of the schools in our data, whereas high schools account for 92 schools in the data, and middle schools only account for 11 schools in our data frame. We believe that there is the most data about elementary schools because elementary schools are normally the smallest of the three in a district and often multiple elementary schools get combined into a middle school and then a high school. We also believe that the lack of middle schools in the data set was due to a lack of prioritization by school districts about the results at the middle school level due to a prioritization on elementary schools results.
Number of Schools in Each District:
This visualization demonstrates that most police wards have an average of 15-30 schools in their district. This is worrying because it seems like the police wards will not have enough resources to properly keep all of the schools in their respective ward safe. Some police wards have as many as 40 different schools in the district. This visualization goes hand in hand with the following visualization about safety scores.
Chicago Schools Choropleth:
Our first choropleth displays the city of Chicago district color-coded by community areas. The red dots are the schools in the dataset plotted on their corresponding locations in Chicago. We gain a better understanding of the layout of our schools and whether there is a discrepancy in some areas versus others.
Our second choropleth allows a deeper understanding of the schools in the data set’s location in comparison to Special Service Areas. This map is taken from 2017 research which puts the schools into perspective of areas that benefited from Special Services and those who are located in areas that did not see effects from the Special Services. These affect the taxing of businesses and families in these areas and we get a slightly better look into the socioeconomic status of some of these schools and their standings.
The third choropleth plots the schools on the original map of Chicago boundaries with the added boundaries of socioeconomically disadvantaged areas which are displayed in the pink lines. The purple dots represent the schools and we can see how much overlap there is from the schools to these disadvantaged areas. We can see that many of the schools and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas fall in the areas surrounding the central, business part of the city and become more frequent the further the communities go out.
School Saftey:
This visualization details that 192 schools' average student believes that they are at an average safety level. However, an astounding 155 schools' average student believes that they are weak in the safety level. This should be very worrying for parents and administrators because students should not have to go to a place where they feel unsafe. Similarly, parents should not have to worry that the school they are sending their child to is unsafe. We believe that safety is one of the most important things at a school and that an unsafe school can severely hamper a learning environment.
Saftey Score vs. Family Involvement Score
These two visualizations both demonstrate a correlation between safety scores and family involvement scores. The first visualization is static and color-coded to show the relationship between school level and family involvement and safety scores. In this first visualization, blue represents elementary schools, green represents high schools and orange represents middle schools. The visualization shows that middle schools in the data set only are in the middle of the graphic meaning that they have an average safety score and average family involvement. This lack of familial involvement can be due to parents and communities prioritizing their children's first and final years of education, overlooking the importance of middle school years. The second visualization is meant to allow viewers to look at individual pairs of scores and demonstrate a trend line between these two scores.
Policy Status:
These visualizations demonstrate a collection of pie charts detailing the Chicago Public School’s policy status in the Chicago Public Schools district. Essentially this status is given to a school after the Chicago Public Schools district evaluates an individual school's performance on a variety of metrics and surveys, as well as student performance. This visualization should be worrying because approximately 249 schools out of the 566 in our data set are currently on probation. That is a huge problem because it means that almost 50% of the schools are not properly meeting educational standards and guidelines. We decided to break this graphic further into pie charts by school level and we noticed that over 50% (almost 60%) of middle and high schools are on probation. This is terrible because it means that as students grow older and get to more advanced material it is more likely that the school they advance to will be providing them with an inadequate education and experience.
Attendance Between Students and Teachers
This visualization demonstrates a trend that on average teachers have better attendance at schools which is a good sign. However, we believe that this statistic could be partially skewed since the dataset provided these numbers as an average based on the average attendance of the students and teachers. This can be misleading because in public schools there is often a student-to-teacher ratio of about 20:1 meaning that more students can be coming to class but because the total number of students is so high it can be messing up the measurement. One insight we can realize is that as students and teachers get to high school they tend to miss more classes, which we can see by the huge drop in the bar charts.
What We Learned:
Overall we learned throughout our analysis that the Chicago Public Schools are severely underdeveloped and underperforming the levels set by the district. This is devastating to the students and families in Chicago because it means that their children are not receiving the proper education due to systemic problems in the education system. We hope that the state of Illinois will become more involved in the public education system by providing increased funding to the schools to allow them to have better resources and to incentivize older students to continue attending school.
Our Data Journey:
We did lots of different data cleansing and editing in order to get our data in a readable format. First and foremost we deleted over 20 different columns because they provided data that was very unnecessary for our project. There were also many instances when NAN was in our dataset instead of a number. Specifically, we made it into a readable data frame which we then used for all of our visualizations. We used several sources of data and combined them on various visualizations.
Our Team and Data Sources:
We are group 12. Our names are Lex Banker and Arabella Baker. We used primarily one data source for our data, however, we also a few different sources to get data to improve our maps. We have linked our key data sources below: