Sunday, October 26, 2014

Mapping discipline on a district and school level

First Attempt
This project did not take very long, but it is a long way from providing a compelling visualization. The set up is simple. We took public school enrollment information from NCES and combined it with disciplinary data that we received in our ORA request to the GA DOE. We looked at the same information at two different levels - by individual schools and by school districts. We mapped each level separately and then recombined the maps using a Fusion Table Layer Wizard.
Because of alleged privacy concerns, we did not have full information on an individual school basis. We eliminated those schools where zero white or zero black students disciplined to potential errors in our data. Zero didn't always mean zero. It sometimes meant that the number was too low to publish because of concerns over student privacy.
The result does not tell a very compelling story, but hopefully it will be a useful exercise for future projects.