Education Graphics:
Patterns in Data
This website contains
substantive information on Texas school test score performance and
expenditures, relationships between donors and recipient members of the State
Policy Network, and details of charter school funding in Texas. But the main focus is on the use of several
methods of interactive computer graphics to investigate and present that
information.
The above graph is an example
of how the techniques used here can provide new and interesting views of raw
data. In this graph each of the 3,453
faintly visible gray points represents an elementary or a middle school among
90 of the largest school districts in Texas.
Those schools included in six school districts are highlighted in
distinct colors. The highlighted
schools demonstrate that within the overall negative relationship between
academic performance (vertical axis) and percentages of students who are
economically disadvantaged, there are very distinct patterns within individual
districts. This data is made available within the interactive graphics
presentation included in the Big90 Graphs option to the left.
The software not only
highlights individual or sets of schools, but also displays numerical
information corresponding to those which were selected.
A Java language version of
this software is described, and will soon be made available for downloading.
This version, to be run on a desktop or portable computer, not within a web
browser, has more features and capabilities than the web version available
here.
The five options available on
the select list to the left are briefly described:
Big90 Graphs. When first selected a brief description of the data
being used is presented. More
importantly, a link to the interactive graphics page is presented. Clicking on this link will present a page
with two graphs and a data area beneath them.
Beneath this link, there are three labels Show steps. Clicking on
these results in drop-down step-by-step instructions that will permit
interacting with the graphs presented. Actually, if the label [AF] is selected
(i.e. clicked on using the left-mouse button)
an automatic display of the schools among the 90 included school
districts will be initiated, the districts being randomly selected in groups of
five. The process can be interrupted by clicking on [Clear]. Clicking on [AS] gives a more slowly paced
automatic display.
Beneath the row of select
buttons is the link [Examples]. This includes step-by-step instructions for two
more elaborate illustrations.
Clicking on the link
[Instructions] displays a detailed, multi-page set of instructions for using
the software.
The Javascript code used for
this page can be packaged with other data sets. Also, even for the data
included in this presentation, provision is made for a user to create different
graphs, using the data included. The
parameters which designate any such newly created graph can be saved to local
storage, retrieved, copied and pasted to an email, and sent to a colleague to
be viewed by him or her on their own computer when connected to this web page.
ScatterBrain™. This selection presents a description of an earlier
version of the Java-based ScatterBrain program. Recently several significant new features have been added and the
revised program will be made available for downloading. This page will soon be
updated to permit downloading the current version of ScatterBrain.
It is pointed out
that ScatterBrain does not involve any coding on the part of the user. It does
require that the tab-delimited data set be structured in a very simple, but
specific form, and that each graph to be displayed be defined—variables to be
plotted selected, axes’ scales determined and labels entered. Data to be displayed in the data table must
also be selected and formats prescribed. From one to four interlinked graphs
can be displayed simultaneously. The descriptions for an individual
presentation, for all graphs and the data table, can then be saved in a setup
file for future use.
ScatterBrain™ Videos. This page provides access to several videos made
with ScatterBrain, using a variety of data obtained from the Texas Education
Agency’s website. A set of data that
includes information for most school districts in the U.S is also used in one
video, obtained from the Stanford
Center for Education Policy Analysis. These were my first attempts at creating videos,
so they are not very polished, but they are intended to demonstrate how the
program can be used in meaningful ways.
Charter Papers. Sometime in 2016 I decided to attempt to resuscitate
a Texas school finance simulation program that was developed nearly 25 years
previously. Doing this required incorporating charter schools into the original
program, as charter schools did not exist in Texas when the program was
originally written. In carrying out this exercise it soon became apparent that
the frequent claim by charter school proponents that charter schools received
$1,000 less per student from the state than was received by regular school
districts from both state and local funds was false. The series of papers and
exercises contained in this section resulted from an attempt to support this
realization.
These
papers formed part of the underpinnings of a paper by David S. Knight and
myself—"Do charter schools receive
their fair share of funding? school finance equity for charter and traditional
public schools”-- that can be accessed at the following link: https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/4438.
SPN/ALEC. The State Policy Network (SPN) and The American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been working for decades to redesign
and reorient the U.S. economic and political systems. In short, their goal has been to reverse progressive gains made
during the New Deal era—lower taxes, less government regulation of the economy,
and less autonomy for local governments.
The movement for so-called choice in public education, while often
viewed as a separate movement to reform U.S. education, has in fact been one of
the major goals of the State Policy Network and its affiliates. The
relationship between the two movements can be demonstrated by observing the
overlap in their funding sources. The
discussion papers and exhibits in this section amplify this assertion, which is
illustrated in the following diagram.
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Larry Toenjes
Clear Lake Shores, TX
ltoenjes@aol.com