Massachussets Education Overview

INTRODUCTION

The strength of any building is deeply rooted in the type of foundation it has. In other words, if you are hoping for a very strong building then you should pay close attention to the foundation. Interestingly, this saying goes for every area of our lives be it relationships, career, education, business etc. Narrowing it down to education, many parents are always concerned and very detailed about the type of schools their children or wards attend. Some of the frequently asked questions on different parenting boards on social media as regards education include:

• What are your recommendations for good school around area XYZ?

• What is the class capacity in school XYZ etc.

And for me, I personally would have concerns about the ratio of students to teachers (Class size), overall experience and commitment of the teachers, overall state of the school amongst other factors. I am of the opinion that finding answers to some of these questions would be a good starting ground for a better tomorrow in our education sector and ultimately the overall success of the students.

In this project, I utilized Tableau to explore a real-life data set on the education overview of high schools in Massachusetts. It was a pretty interesting learning experience for me.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

Over the years in the United States, Massachusetts workforce has been known to be the state with the highest record of college degree holders. However, very recently, there has been a drastic drop in the percentage of high school graduates proceeding to earn a college degree, and this has become an alarming issue for the state Education sector. As a matter of fact, data revealed that total number of high school graduates attending has dipped by ten percent. This has become a major concern to the State superintendent and other major stakeholders [Check Here]. This singular reason birthed the need to perform this analysis to unravel some of these questions and see if they apply in real world scenarios. Presented in this project is the dataset from the different high schools in the State of Massachusetts. The analysis I performed was to give the State superintendent a report that shows the school board the overall state of the school system while also gathering information on:

• Schools that are struggling the most (Low Graduation rate)

• How class size affect college admission?

• The top math schools in the state.

DATA

The data was supplied as an excel file for the year 2017. It was imported into Tableau. Dataset has 1861 rows and 299 columns. All analysis and visualization were performed in Tableau Public.

ANALYSES

Once the data was loaded, I was ready to answer the questions listed above that might be potentially useful to the school superintendent. The first task I performed was to find out the schools that are struggling the most. The graph below depicts the worst performing Schools in the State. I applied filter on the graduating % column to remove null value associated with schools within the data that are not high schools

Research has shown that that some of the leading factors for low school attendance include poverty, class size, parent involvement amongst others. In this analysis, I chose to see how college attendance is impacted by two of these factors in the plot below

In the scatter plot above, I was hoping to see a much stronger correlation between class size and college attendance. Incorporating an additional factor of the economically disadvantage students in color code, I found that the more disadvantaged the students are, the lower their percentage attending college.

The next task was to find out the top math schools in the state. The superintendent believes that 4th grade math is key to a student’s success and would like to focus on improving the state’s MCAS 4th grade Math Passing value (50%). The line chart below shows only four schools are above the desired threshold of 50. Now that these schools are known, the teachers in these highlighted schools will assist in training the rest of the state on how to improve math scores.

Lastly, I designed a dashboard that the superintendent can present to the school board to visualize the overall state of the school system. This dashboard can easily show them areas to be considered for further improvement of the school system.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Based on the results from the class size, class sizes between 12 and 20 students seems to work best for all the students regardless of their socio-economic status and on this note I think that the recommendation for more schools cannot be ascertained at this time.

• To increase college attendance rate, I would recommend that the State of Massachusetts Education board look into other factors asides class size for future improvements.

• State of Massachusetts has 1861 schools out of which only four of these schools passed the 4th Grade Math with the passing mark of 50%. I therefore think it’s important the State reaches out to the teachers from these four schools and arrange with them ways to improve the other schools statewide.

• Overall, I am impressed the Superintendent is concerned about school improvement and I personally applaud his efforts channeled towards analyzing this data to see how and where improvements can be made. It’s my opinion that having this report will help to effect changes that will shape the future of our children for years to come.

If you have followed my post to this point, I will like to thank you! I enjoyed myself putting all of these together especially because education is a topic I care so much about. I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions as I aim to keep getting better.

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