Achieve Hartford – Page 2

Currently, all of the visualizations I have made are GitHub repositories that can be forked (shared) with others. The repositories are titled as follows: CAPTMap, CMTMap, CAPTProficiencyChart, CMTProficiencyChart, and CohortChart. After creating a GitHub account, these repositories can be easily accessed by searching for my username marissablock23.

The underlying data was provided by Achieve Hartford and the data is already public. I did not make many changes to the data that AchieveHartford provided me, so they should easily understand my spreadsheet, though I cleaned it up a bit. I saved the data which as Google Spreadsheets and then created the maps using Google Fusion Tables. The maps are also available publicly entitled CAPT_Proficient and CMT_Proficient.

Finally, in terms of updating the visualizations for the future, one does not need to have a significant amount of coding experience to update the maps and charts. However, enhancing the visualizations will require more time and effort. With limited coding experience, I could not include some of the more interactive features that I would have liked to.

Cohort data follows the same group of students from year to year in order to track their achievement gains and/or losses. This data tracks a group of students beginning in Grade 3 in 2007 until Grade 8 in 2012. Looking at the cohort of all Hartford students, the percentage at proficiency increases from Grade 5 to 6, but then gradually declines in Grade 7 and 8. In looking at all the schools, it seems as if the general trend is that percentage at proficiency peaks around Grade 6.

Another important takeaway from the graph is comparing magnet school performance to Hartford overall, and comparing Hartford residents of those magnet schools to the magnet school overall. In general, the magnet schools tend to be above the Hartford average. When comparing Hartford resident magnet school students to the rest of the magnet students at that school, a lower percentage of Hartford residents tend to meet proficiency. However, when comparing Hartford resident students of magnet schools to students of district schools, a higher percentage of magnet school students tend to meet proficiency.

The maps below offer a spatial distribution of the schools in Hartford by school zones. The schools are coded (red, yellow, or green) based on the percentage who met proficiency in 2013. The maps aim to answer the question, “Do certain zones have better school options than others?” The map of schools based on CMT proficiency seems to indicate that Zone 1 (top left) has the most school’s with higher achieving students. The CAPT is more difficult to interpret because it contains a small number of schools. The CAPT is taken during 10th grade, so the map only shows high schools. Based on the map, there does not appear to be very much middle ground between performance levels. Furthermore, in viewing the graph that tracks the progression of proficiency from 2007-2013, all the magnet high schools are above the Hartford average for every year between 2007-2013. All the district high schools are below the Hartford average, with the exception of Bulkeley in 2009 and 2010.

CMT Proficiency Map

CAPT Proficiency Map

Category: Achieve Hartford

Transition Plan

Visualizing Achievement in Hartford Schools