/School_District_Analysis

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

School District Analysis

Overview

The following analysis of the school district, which includes:

  • a high-level summary of key metrics for the district as a whole
  • these same high-level key metrics for each school in the district
  • the top-5 and bottom-5 performing schools based on their overall passing rate
  • the average math and reading scores by grade for each school
  • performance based on budget per student
  • performance based on the school size
  • performance based on the type of school (Charter or District)

While this analysis was in flight, the school board notified us that the data showed potential evidence of academic disonesty. Reading and math grades for Thomas High School ninth-grade students may have been altered.
As a result, we took efforts to exclude these test scores from our analysis. You will see this clarified in the Deliverable 1 and Deliverable 2 sections of PyCitySchools_Challenge.ipynb as well as below, in the Results section of this README.

Results

Impact on the District Summary

At a glance, it appears there was not much of an impact on the District Summary. However, taking a closer look at the delta between the analyses, we see that further consideration might be warranted.

The change between District Summaries are as follows:

  • % Passing Math: -0.27%
  • % Passing Reading: -0.12%
  • % Overall Passing: -0.46%

Excluding a single high school's ninth-grade class amounted to nearly a half-percent change in the overall passing rate of students district-wide; this could have significant implications for funding.

See screenshots below.

Compare the original analysis:

district_summary_og

to the adjusted analysis:

district_summary_adjusted

Impact on the School Summary

At the school-level, the impact of excluding Thomas High School's ninth-grade test scores appears less than it was on the district as a whole. Here are the respective changes from the adjusted over the original analysis.

  • % Passing Math: -0.09%
  • % Passing Reading: -0.30%
  • % Overall Passing: -0.35%

Here is the School Summary for Thomas High School only. (top: adjusted analysis; bottom: original analysis) thomas_school_summary_adjusted thomas_school_summary_og

Here is the final summary for all schools, with the Thomas High School ninth-grade test scores excluded:

per_school_summary_adjusted

Impact on Thomas High School's Performance

When excluding ninth-grade test scores, Thomas High School still remained the second-best performer in the district.

top_performing_schools

Impact on Other Analyses

Math and Reading Scores by Grade

Math and reading scores by grade were not impacted, save for the new analysis only having nan in the place of test scores for '9th'. Since we were calculating means, nan is excluded. Other schools were not impacted.

Math Scores by Grade

math_scores_by_grade

Reading Scores by Grade

reading_scores_by_grade

School Spending, School Size, and School Type

These analyses were largely unchanged.

Thomas High School remained in these brackets, regardless of the changes we made to the test scores: $631-645 in spending per student, Medium-sized school, and Charter-type school.

Spending Summary

spending_summary

School Size Summary

school_size_summary

School Type Summary

school_type_summary

Summary

  1. The school district saw a -0.46% change in '% Overall Passing' data.
  2. Thomas High School saw a -0.35% change in '% Overall Passing' data.
  3. We worked with a smaller population of Thomas High School students when calculating the percentages of passing students.
  4. Most analyses were not impacted by replacing Thomas High School ninth-grade test scores with nan. Other schools were not directly impacted; as mentioned in #1, there was, of course, an indirect impact in the district-wide summary.