Is there a significance to the location of the point on each graph where all the lines are emanating from?
It's where the city proper falls on the two axes.
That's what I first thought, but you can't mouseover it like the rest, and it doesn't have a bubble to indicate population.
The population of New York City is 8,550,405.
I mean, I'm sure that is it, but I still think it's strange.
Given the history of the area plus the geography (good port, solid bedrock for supporting dense construction), it's not strange at all.
If you type in the name of the city as it appears in the chart, you'll see the bubble, and also see why it's not shown by default (it's huge).
It wasn't obvious to me at the beginning that the city is a single school district. I thought it might have been dispersed across a bunch of little bubbles. Austin is broken up into a bunch of school districts in counterintuitive ways, (although only one of them is called the Austin CISD).
Nice chart! Fascinating that the correlation is much weaker than I would have expected, and very outlier-driven such as it is. SF is the exception, but the others are surprisingly flat.
Minneapolis is hilariously flat, and also includes things that are bizarrely far away (Mankato?) and not obviously part of the CSA or MSA.
Somerville (where I am! where the kid starts public school this fall!) is in an... interesting place on that chart.
How are they evaluating School Quality? Is it just test scores?
How are they evaluating School Quality? Is it just test scores?
Using home price data from Redfin, a national real estate brokerage, and school quality data based on test scores from the Stanford Education Data Archive
A geographer I follow on Twitter (he stopped updating his blog :( ) said that he'd done a similar exercise during his last move, but that what he looked for was low test scores crossed with high ESL rates. "White BA+ households pay insane premiums for "good" schools."
Rather bizarre that there are exactly two districts that are more expensive housing and worse performing schools (and bad commute.) Why is there demand in those housing markets- bad zoning leading to a shortage of housing?
11- Not that you should tell me on the public blog, but I'd be interested to hear which school.
I don't know. I assume it's more or less normal that every city has places where you can get a nice house, a half hour commute, reasonable schools, and three-digit mortgage payment.
Where I live is behind, no surprise. We're currently hoping to get Atossa into one of the few good-seeming schools in the area, counting on the fact that other UMC white or model-minority parents in the neighborhood aren't concerned, and assuming that if the elementary schools really are so bad that she gets dragged down we'd have time to move before high school if necessary.
My general belief is that subtle dragging-down isn't much of an issue in grade school -- if a school is a reasonably safe and pleasant environment, a middle class kid is going to do fine.
I believe the children are our future. Hold them close and push them to get an A.
Show them it's their duty to get a free ride.
That should be "full ride". Sorry.
Arlington had a reputation for good schools, because young professionals have moved in. Lexington is up there, but there's no diversity and kids learn that they only have value if they get in to Harvard. Used to be very white but now there are a lot of East Asians, so I guess that's some diversity. I'd love to be able to get more kinds of information.