Public education agencies collect huge amounts of information about students, teachers and schools. And most of that data can easily be tied into a geographic location: a school building point, an attendance zone or even a census tract. So there are plenty of opportunities for journalists to use GIS analysis in education reporting. Here are some ways that journalists have been turning to GIS to help uncover trends in education.
Shifting attendance
John Welbes, an education reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, heard during a school board meeting last year that some Minnesota school districts had been losing students under the state's open enrollment system. That meant those schools also lost state aid money tied to enrollment.
Welbes obtained an Excel spreadsheet from the state that contained one row for every public school student. One column contained the identification number of the school that the student attended. Another contained the identification number of the school district in which the student resided.
Using that file, Janet Roberts, the newspaper's computer-assisted reporting coordinator, summarized the data by loss or gain for the region's school districts. She imported the table to ArcView and mapped the changes in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.
The map showed that center city districts lost students; so did some in the suburbs.
Charter schools
As part of its "Cheating the Classroom" stories, reporters at The Miami Herald wanted to see whether charter schools in Miami-Dade County were anything like their surrounding neighborhoods.
The Herald had a data file with information about each school, including the school's street address. Using the geocoding function in ArcView, database editor Jason Grotto created a point map layer that showed the location of all the schools. Then he joined a table of school demographic information and another of neighborhood demographic data from Census 2000.
Grotto then selected nearby non-charter public schools in another map layer and found that many of the charter schools' student demographics were different from those in adjacent public schools. In addition, the GIS analysis showed that the charter schools failed to reflect the neighborhoods they were supposed to serve.
For instance, according to its contract with the Miami-Dade schools, Miami Shores/Barry University charter school is required to serve students within a 4-mile radius, and its population should reflect the community. But the mapping showed the charter was the only public middle school in that 4 mile radius where fewer than 25 percent of the students received free or reduced lunch. It also was the only school with a majority white student population.
School week
The Denver Post used ArcView 3.2 for a story about Colorado school districts that switched to four-day weeks. The map showed that the switch to a shorter school week mostly was happening in the rural parts of the state, where administrators were trying to save money.
Monte Whaley, one of the newspaper's education reporters, entered the information about the district schedules from the Colorado Department of Education into a spreadsheet. CAR editor Jeff Roberts then mapped the results using a school districts shapefile.
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