Massachusetts Education Overview Project (2017)

Why this Project?

This project enables us to evaluate the performance of 1,861 Massachusetts Schools in 2017 by looking at several key metrics

Why you the reader should keep reading

This project measured several key metrics namely, percentage of students going on to college, class size, and amount of students economically disadvantaged. The project also looks at the percentage of students graduating high school which varies widely across the state.

What and Where of the Data Set

Used Excel spread sheet of MA_public_schools_2017 provided through Arron Smith's Data Analyst Accelerator Bootcamp. Excel spreadsheet was downloaded to local computer and then uploaded into Tableau.

All Analysis

The analysis for this project was done in Tableau Public because Tableau is one of the best and most used data visualization tools on the market. A Tableau dashboard was created and then explained in a three minute LOOM video. The dashboard shows up at top on either side of the title the two important BANS, the number of schools (1,861) and the number of students (953,748). A scatter plot was created to show the relationship of class size vs % students attending college, with a trendline showing these metrics rose largely in proportion to each other. A bar chart was used to show which schools had least to most students graduating and a line chart with a reference line of 50% showed which school districts are doing well and which need more work to achieve acceptable performance.

Main Takeaways

1) As Class size grew, the percentage of students attending college rose roughly proportionally.

2) the darker the color of dots, the higher the percentage of economically disadvantage students. Schools and districts with more economically disadvantage students had fewer students graduating and attending college.

3) a Bar chart shows the percentage of students graduating for a given school. As one descends the percentage of students graduating gets higher.. going from red (poor) to green (most students graduating). I suspect that if one chose a school from the red area, one would find that there are more economically disadvantaged students in that school compared to those in a school in green.