May 2014
The Pennsylvania Dept of Education provides in-depth metrics about each public school in the state. While this data is detailed, by itself it doesn't provide any visibility into overall performance trends across the state. The goal of this project is to augment the data set with visualizations that provide insight into trends and patterns in the data.
Notes:
School score distribution
Each high school's average SAT score is considered one unit in the distribution. Although the familiar 'bell-curve' is apparent, there are quite a few schools on the left side of the performance spectrum with substantially worse performance than the median.
Best and worst schools
Each high school is represented by a vertical bar. Only the best and worst ranking 1/7th of the schools are shown. Of note is the city of Philadelphia, which has two of the top schools and many of the lowest performing schools.
Scores by region
Each high school in PA is represented by a circle on the map - the color represents the school average SAT score, and the area of the circle represents the school's estimated graduating class size. City schools tend to perform much worse than the rings of suburban schools surrounding them.
School metrics
Scatterplots illustrate potential correlations between two metrics - each circle represents a single school. Note the strong correlation between SAT scores and the percentage of 'Economically Disadvantaged' students.