January 29, 2015
Emergency Makeover: Vaccination Rates at California Elementary Schools
Consider this Viz of the Day from January 28, 2015.
What is incredibly ironic is that I saw this literally minutes after having talked about color blindness in a data viz class I was teaching. In the room was a colleague of mine, who is red-green color blind. I showed it to him and said "What do you see?" to which he responded "A bunch of brown dots."
I ran the map through the Vischeck color blindness simulator and low and behold, this is what you get:
Now can you understand why I'm getting so upset? Who picks VotD after all? Why aren't best practices part of the criteria? Does anyone know the criteria? Is there a criteria?
I downloaded the workbook and made a few simple adjustments to it. Here's my version after about 15 minutes of TLC. I focused on color, sorting, tooltips and filtering.
Don't get me wrong; It's a huge honor to get chosen for VotD. I know I get excited every time one of my vizzes is chosen. But what I really want, and I think there are lots of other people with me, is for VotD to be an amazing gallery that everyone recognizes as the most outstanding work done with Tableau. Work that's designed well. Work that's visually appealing. Work that follows best practices. Work you'd want to emulate.
With the visibility that the Viz of the Day gallery has, am I asking for too much? If I am, please tell me. Explain to me why I'm off base. If you're in agreement with me, let your voice be heard.
June 7, 2011
Facts are friendly: Why Cobb County should keep the balanced calendar
NOTE: The data and charts in this post are excerpts from “The Citizens Report on the Cobb County School District Attendance Calendar”. There are limitations on the data, but overall I think you’ll agree that the School Board has made an incredible unwise decision to revert to the traditional school calendar.
Summary
The data shows overwhelming support for the Balanced Calendar by all stakeholder groups: teachers, staff, parents, students, and the community. The data points are:
- 2009 Employee Survey
- 2011 Calendar Survey
- Board Member Reports & Email Counts
- 2011 Cobb County Association of Educators Survey
The results of these four data points are remarkably consistent. When presented with the opportunity for a school calendar with a shorter summer and additional week-long breaks versus a later August start date and no additional week-long breaks, all stakeholder groups strongly prefer a calendar with a shorter summer and additional week-long breaks.
Across all data points the margin of preference for the Balanced Calendar is significant, averaging 76.1%. The support ranges from a low of 61.0% to a high of 88.2%.
Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS)
Grade Equivalency (GE) scores for Cobb’s third, fifth, and seventh graders had all been declining in recent years. However, for the first time since 2007, ITBS GE scores in Cobb County increased in 2010 in all of these grade levels.
End-of-Course Test (EOCT)
Results in ELA and Social Studies have maintained a slight but steady increase through the 2010-2011 school year. Results in Science showed a slight decrease in 2010-2011, returning to their 2008 level of 71% meeting or exceeding standards. After a 23% decline in 2008-2009, results in Math dramatically improved by 26% in 2009-2010. They continued to improve by another 11% to 75% in 2010-2011, reaching a level not obtained since 2006-2007.
Teacher absences
Absences down significantly YTD through March 2011 as compared to the last three school years.
This amounts to 15,008.7 fewer days teachers were absent in 2010-2011 versus 2009-2010 through March. This has two benefits. The first is the direct benefit of lower expenses for substitute teachers. Specifically, the direct financial savings are $1,118,381.26 YTD through March 2011, due to lower expenses for substitute teachers. Second, our students benefited by having their own certified teachers in the classroom more often.
Student absenteeism
Absenteeism was down 27,600 days in the first semester of the 2010-2011 school year (August - December 2010). This represents a decrease of 7.5% district-wide as compared to the first semester of the 2009-2010 school year.
Of 120 schools, 75.8% reported improvements in student attendance and 24.2% reported an increase in student absenteeism. As student attendance is the second AYP indicator for elementary and middle schools, the influence of the school calendar on student attendance is vitally important.
Student Discipline
Data available from the Georgia Department of Education (DIS010) through May 17, 2011 shows:
Once the year-end data is available for 2010-2011, the results will need to be adjusted for inclement weather days and the shorter 175-day school year. In total, these two factors should account for 3.4% of any decrease in student discipline.
February 19, 2011
A broken Electorate system. The Cobb County school calendar poll results visualized.
Last year, the Cobb County Board of Education voted on a balanced school calendar that starts school at the beginning of August and provides more frequent breaks throughout the year. Despite this being voted in as a three-year calendar, some of the recently elected board members put forth a motion to change the calendar back to a more traditional calendar. Here are the results from the survey they conducted to get community feedback:
View the School Board’s version of the results here. I wonder if they intentionally put the results on separate pages to make it difficult to compare them side by side. In the view above, you can clearly see that community overwhelmingly favors the August 1 calendar (the current calendar).
Which way did the school board vote? 4-3 in favor of the August 15th calendar. Seriously! How the hell does this happen? Watch the motion hearing here.
Needless to say, parents are outraged.
In a Democracy, an Electorate system is often put in place so that the interests of many are represented by a few. The way it is “supposed” to work is that the representatives heavily weigh the opinions of their electorate when making decisions, but clearly four members of the school board have not in this case. It’s incredibly sad that special interests appear to have played a part in the vote, but then again, that’s nothing new here in the USA; votes can easily be bought (see campaign contributions and pork barrel spending).
Some quotes of note:
WSB-TV: School board member Tim Stultz said “I'm not prepared to let one side just rule because they have majority numbers.”
Marietta Daily Journal:Beth Kriebel (a parent, PTA member, and my wife) spoke at the meeting and said “I think you’re taking a huge risk in changing something that greatly impacts any family that has a student in the school district. While campaign promises were made last year by some of you, what about the majority of Cobb County parents who have adjusted to the balanced calendar on good faith that no changes would be made?”
I’m proud of my wife for standing up and representing the interests of the great majority of Cobb County residents.
