Although this project seemed very tedious and frustrating at first, however, once it is complete it holds many important values. One of the biggest lessons that I took away from this project is that there is not only disparity between different school districts but also the disparity between schools within a district. It has also been useful in giving us practice on researching what may seem like important factors in school which could help us in the future.
Our school district was the Madison Metropolitan School District which covers a fairly diverse area. With a larger area such as Madison, the population that each school is catering too can be quite different. Some areas may be catering to communities with lower income families while another school just a few blocks away could be catering to a more developed and higher income population. This could be a possible cause for the large gap between many of the demographic factors that we looked at. However, I was surprised to see some of the factors within the district as a whole were fairly close such as the student to teacher ratio and the per pupil spending (except for 1-2 outliers). I was also surprised that it was very difficult to find if the schools offered any clubs, extracurricular activities or AP/IB classes.
Taking a step back from just the pure data, the process of finding school factors can be very useful in the future. Although nothing will be able to fully prepare you for when you first step into the classroom, some of these sources and variables can be helpful when looking for jobs. This project not only gave us data about schools to interpret but it has also given us resources that we may be able to use in the future. Looking at this information can help you decide which school may suit your needs best. However, data is not completely reliable/representative of a district. One of the downfalls of this project is that we are purely looking at quantitative data that we find. It tells us nothing about the culture of the school or the classroom. Nor does it take into account the effectiveness of the teaching. Data can give us a lot of helpful information that can impact us. For example, by looking at the population of the school, teacher student ratio, and number of staff can help us get a sense of a school’s need for teachers. Schools that have high student to teacher ratio are likely to reflect a higher need for teachers because class size matters in a students ability to learn and form relationships. On the other hand, there are factors that can not be represented simply by data such as the classroom culture, administrative support, etc. Often you must experience what is like within the school for a longer period of time in order to be able to know if the school fits you.
