The question has often been asked, what outside factors influence educational proficiency. The following visualizations and facts presented take a look at what some of these factors may potentially be.
This first visualization shows the most striking trend which has long been discussed and debated. This is the clearly strong correlation between income, and educational attainment.
This correlation coefficient, which is about .8 in this case, is close to a perfect correlation of 1. This means that the data is very nearly fit to a line with a constant slope, deviating very little from the trend of income to test scores. While this graph is very telling, it isn’t an end-all to the education debate.
The following visualization explores the impact of geography on test scores.
Seeing as this data is less concrete, it is nearly difficult to unequivocally estimate fixed trends. This being said, to the naked eye, at least in the instance of the Greater Hartford Area, there appears to be little to no correlation between geography and scholastic achievement. The case could be made that the areas of poverty and thus low test scores are more prevalent in the city, but this information would not be sufficiently backed with our given data.
We are able to see the tip of the iceberg with these above visualizations, but what lies in the ocean is a whole other story.