According to educational historian David Labaree, there are three goals that the public school system strives to achieve: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. In essence, a public education is supposed to give children equal opportunities for success in life, regardless of their socioeconomic status. In this study we will look at how effective the current public school system is at providing similar experiences across different districts. To do this we will look at indicators of success in the classrooms and compare them across school districts demographics from the Urban Institute. Our measure of success will be the percentage of students that are proficient in both math and reading/language arts as well as graduation rates for public school districts. Student success data gathered from the U.S. Department of Education is at the school level so we will create a formula to map the information to the school district level. With this information we will study the correlation between socioeconomic status and success. The results of our study indicated that the percentage of families in poverty and the percentage of families with a single parent are strong indicators of the percentage of math and reading proficient students within the school districts. We also found that graduation rates are not a viable indicator of success. Going forward we will break down the relationship between school levels and student success as well as district location and student success and analyze whether or not socioeconomic factors have an impact on their relationships.
Author: Alyson Everett, Data Science and Statistics
Advisor: Thomas Fisher, Statistics
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