project-team_dd

School diversity across different school districts and in different school years ================ by Team DD

Summary

We researched diversity across different school districts and in different school years. We used a TidyTuesday dataset. The data comes from The Washington Post and the analysis used the Common Core of Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). We worked with a data frame with 27,944 rows and 15 variables where each row represents a school district for each school year that we analysed. The analysis only looks at US elementary schools. The question that we posed was ‘To identify the most and least diverse type of school district and to compare the changes in school diversity of the school years 1994-1995 and 2016-2017’. Before carrying out any analysis we hypothesised that large cities would have the greatest diversity and remote rural areas would have the least diversity. We also hypothesised that there would be more diversity in school districts in the school year 2016-2017 compared to 1994-1995. Our reasoning behind using these specific school years is that the school year 1994-1995 is the earliest near-comprehensive data and the dataset used the school year 2016-2017 as it was the latest available data. We decided to use these years as it allows us to compare the change in diversity after a large time period. The variable which we used to compare the diversity was diverse which was measured as follows:

Diversity is defined as the proportion of students in the dominant racial group.
- Diverse districts are places where fewer than 75% of students are the same race
- Undiverse districts are where 75%-90% of students are the same race
- Extremely undiverse districts are where more than 90% of students are the same race

Firstly, we decided to investigate which school district types were most and least diverse. We found that cities were the most diverse school district type as they had the greatest proportion of school districts with a ‘Diverse’ rating. We also found that rural school districts were the least diverse as they had they greatest proportion of schools with an ‘Extremely Undiverse’ rating and the lowest proportion of schools with a ‘Diverse’ rating. We then decided to look closer into the characteristics of each type of school district. This allowed us to gain a better understanding of the diversity in each school district type. Midsize cities were most diverse as they had the largest proportion of school districts with a ‘Diverse’ rating. We also found that distant rural districts were least diverse as they had the greatest proportion of school districts with an ‘Extremely Undiverse’ rating and the lowest proportion with a ‘Diverse’ rating. Both results contradicted our hypothesis, so we looked further into the reasons why. Firstly, we looked at why rural-remote districts were more diverse than rural-distant districts. Although this result contradicted our hypothesis, the diversity for both school district types was very similar so our prediction wasn’t vastly off. We investigated many possible reasons that we thought would cause this however we couldn’t reach a concrete conclusion. When looking into the reasons why midsize cities were more diverse than large cities, we compared the school year 1994-1995 and 2016-2017. We found that there was a large increase in the diversity of small districts in 2016-2017 compared to 1994-1995. This increase was smaller for midsize cities and even smaller for large cities, indicating that immigrants find small cities preferable to large cities. We found that there is a trade-off between lower cost of living and the desired ‘city-buzz’ in small and large cities, possibly explaining why midsize cities are preferable to immigrants and consequently explaining why these school districts are most diverse. Comparing the two school years, we found that the school year 2016-2017 was more diverse than 1994-1995. We concluded this because the proportion of school with a ‘Diverse’ rating was higher for every school district type in 2016-2017. Possible reasons explaining this were improved transportation and improvement in the education system. Based on our findings we thought that it would be interesting to find out which specific school district types had the greatest and least increase in diversity when comparing the two school years. We found that small city districts had the greatest increase. This could be because cities have a large availability of jobs and small cities have a low cost of living compared to larger cities. We also found that rural-distant and rural-remote districts had the smallest increase in diversity. This could be due to the lack of home and jobs available in these areas.

Presentation

Our presentation can be found here. Our recorded presentation can be found here.

Data

TidyTuesday, 2019, School Diversity, electronic dataset, GitHub, viewed 22 October 2020, https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/tree/master/data/2019/2019-09-24

Rabinowitzn, K, Emamdjomeh, A, Meckler, L, 2019, How the nation’s growing racial diversity is changing our schools, The Washington Post, 12 September, viewed 22 October 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/school-diversity-data/

National Center for Education Statistics (2017) Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data, Available at: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp (Accessed: 22 October 2020)

References

Weinstein, D., E., 2014, Are big cities always more expensive?, World Economic Form, 07 November, viewed 25 November 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/11/are-big-cities-always-more-expensive/

Wodke, G. T, 2014, ‘The Impact of Education on Inter-Group Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis’, Soc Psychol Q., Viewed 1 December 2020, Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883053/

Kolodner, M, 2015, Can better transportation increase diversity on college campuses?, The Hechinger Report, 04 November, viewed 1 December 2020, Available at: https://hechingerreport.org/can-better-transportation-increase-diversity-on-college-campuses/

National Center for Education Statistics (2006) Rural Education in America - Definitions Available at: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ruraled/definitions.asp (Accessed: 30 November 2020).