The education team started with many ideas. Should we focus on attendance, special education statistics, class size, teacher experience or one of the thousand other options?
On Thursday, the team discussed those topics and the potential stories and implications from each. We eventually decided to measure economic disadvantage and academic performance through free and reduced lunch data and Oregon reading and math test scores.
The group did not set out to tell a single story, instead to create a prototype that would track trends and make side-by-side comparison.
To build the database, the group pulled data from the Oregon Department of Education. One of the major tasks was making the data uniform. Throughout the years and spreadsheets metrics changed and shifted. For example the data used to separate meets and exceeds into separate data fields, over the years the two categories merged into a single ‘meets’ category. Merging those categories, and cleaning and unifying a thousand, the number is hyperbolic but the sentiment stands, other little things.
After two and a half days and a huge amount of catering the team created a website, a narrative, maps, interactive graphics and loads of potential for future tools.
by Alex Wallachy