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.
Charters
v ISDs. In this
section you can run a program that displays the degree of success of over 7,500
Texas schools in achieving “Meets Grade Level” criteria for their
students. The MGL success data are for
school year 2018-2019. The principal
focus of the displayed data is upon academic success relative to the proportion
of economically disadvantaged students in each school. The individual school data can be displayed for
all the schools in each county or for all the schools in a district, and the
results can be distinguished between those
for charter schools and for schools included in regular school districts. All
of the features described above for the program which displays data for the
largest 90 school districts in Texas are also available here.
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.
Common Contributors to Pro-Choice Network and to State Policy Network Gave
$1,102
million to PCN and $472 million to SPN (plus Associate Members)
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Larry
Toenjes
Clear Lake
Shores, TX
ltoenjes@aol.com