Friday, September 19, 2014

Missouri Schools 2014 Annual Report

Our local NBC affiliate reported that the 2014 APR for Missouri schools had been released for review. Well I like education and I like numbers so naturally I had to click on that story. I wasn’t surprised when I clicked on the link to the report to find the report in PDF format…boo. C’mon people tabular easy to consume data is what we want.
Here is a quick summary of the APR guidelines. I do not really understand it all and more information can be found on the Missouri Department of Education web site. Basically each school can earn X amount of points (varies from school to school). Then school is graded using the APR guidelines to produce a total points earned score.
So the first step was to grab the data and clean it up into a usable format. I thought it would be cool to grab the addresses for all the School Districts as well that way we could throw the schools on the map. With a few minutes of searching I was able to dump all the school district addresses into a CSV. From there it took some dynamite copy/pasting skills to merge the two data sets. Final result was this spreadsheet: School Performance.xls
Now the easy part, convert the xls into a csv file, throw the csv into a Google Fusion Document, and let Google do all the geocoding work for me. Now we can slice and dice the data however we want.
I created a couple quick maps using the data.
Here is a map charting the difference between 2013 and 2014 percent of total points earned. This shows schools that have increased or dropped from their 2013 performance report numbers.
The Second map here is color coded by percentage of total points earned. I am still tweaking the color coding to match the data set. 
Anyway, sending this data out to my educator friends. I may slice the data up a little more depending on the feedback.
Here is a link to the Google Fusion Document used to build the maps: 
If you want a map created or want the data sliced a certain way, holler. 

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