Improving your School District

Proposal

In two of my previous Modules (2 & 3), I have tried to analyze the neighborhoods where a family would like to move into based on various factors like – budget, crime, access to stores etc. This module (Module 5) is an extension of that. In this module, I would like to highlight the areas where a family with kids would like to move into based on the quality of the school district. As we know that each school district has number of public schools and you can only attend a particular school based on the address of your residence. However, you can always attend any private school irrespective of the address of your residence. This report will further discuss the probable reasons behind the low ratings of some of the school districts and would recommend some of the steps if taken can help improve the school district.

Datasets used

For this analysis, I have prepared a comprehensive dataset using open data available on niche.com. The data contains overall rating of Pittsburgh Public School District and other 16 districts adjacent to Pittsburgh. Niche.com (https://www.niche.com/) provides the overall rating of a school district in the form of grades with the best rating of A+ and the worst being D+. I have converted the grades into ratings with A+ getting a rating of 10 and D+ gets a rating of 1. The following table shows the conversion:

The overall grade depends upon several factors – Academics, Teachers, Clubs & Activities, Administration, Food, Diversity, College Prep, Health and Safety, Sports and Resources and Facilities. Further, these factors are dependent upon other sub-factors. For example, academic ratings are based on the proficiency in math and reading, SAT scores etc.

Analysis

While factors like food, administration, sports etc. are important factors, academic results always take priority in defining such ratings. The graph below can show how the overall rating of a school district is linked to the academic ratings. As we can see that the school counties of Mount Lebanon and Fox Chapel are doing brilliantly well whereas Sto-rox and Wilkinsburg have had some major problems. Another analysis shows the money spent per pupil by each county. This graph shows that some of counties like Wilkinsburg despite putting in a lot of money have not yielded the desired results whereas some of the counties like Sto-rox and Northgate simply do not have resources.

Another analysis was performed to see the salary of the teachers against the academic rating of the school counties. The purpose was to see if the ‘better’ teachers are going to particular school districts in search of better pay. This of course is an assumption. As we can see some of the school districts like Wilkinsburg have a good teacher salary however, they have not been able to perform that well.     

Finally, another analysis was performed to see what are academic ratings based on and I found out that there is somewhat a direct relation between academic ratings and proficiency in math and reading. The relationship with Graduation Rate is not linear and becomes constant after a while. This shows that while the students are graduating, their proficiency in math and reading is not up to the mark.

Conclusion

For a family who would like to move into a new district in and around Pittsburgh, Mount Lebanon and Fox Chapel would be the two good options. However, the bigger question is what happens to the other school districts and how can we as a community help to improve these numbers?

Recommendations

At first, we might be itching to say that unless we don’t find a top-down approach, these numbers will never improve. While it might be true to a certain extent, there are a lot of steps a community can take that does not require a lot of finances but can help the students in a great way. The ultimate goal of this intervention would be to understand the problem first. For example, let’s take the example of Steel Valley school district who has got a graduation rate of almost 95% however, the math and reading proficiency hardly touches 50%. Finding out the major problems which hinders the academic growth of students in this district could be a start. Now the question arises as to how can we accomplish it? I shall be discussing some of the ways in which we as a community can help:

1. Presenting good examples from the community – During the school years, everyone one of has got an idol whom we admire and would like to be someday. Showing kids some good examples from the community who went on to achieve something might be a good start as at this age, children get influenced very easily and therefore we need to make sure that they have the right person to look up to.

2. Collaboration among school districts – We can introduce more and more competitions and collaborative assignments among the school districts so that students from one district can learn from other districts. This kind of collaboration can help bridge the gap between these school districts.

3. Meetings among school districts – Why can’t one district who is performing not so well can learn from the district who has been performing exceptionally well? It is true that some of the issues might be specific to a certain school district. However, one might learn some innovative ways of teaching and learning in such a conference.

4. Involve Parents – Some of the parents work two jobs and do not have the time to look after their child’s education. However, we need to make sure that the parents must know how good or not their child is performing and also discuss if the child is going through any personal tragedies. Such meetings must be made compulsory to attend every month.

All of these strategies can be adopted together while we wait for more top-down approaches like hiring better teachers and opening more education centers like SAT training centers to help the students. All these strategies require approvals and financial consideration and there could be a long-term plan.