Chapter 6 Conclusion

The main motivation of the project was to explore NY state assessment in Math and Reading / Language, Art across different student’s backgrounds. Throughout this data exploration we have observed significant gaps in students’ performance. Students from different racial and ethnics backgrounds had a significant gap in the assessment results. That being said, since we do not have the relevant data to perform multidimensional review we are unable to provide in-depth analysis of the relationship of the student background and other factors such as income level or access to high quality education. Furthermore the reported data does not show different characteristics of a student in separate variables. For example, we cannot asses the intraction of race / ethnicity with any other student categories such as sex or socioeconomic status.

An interesting observation in our review was the relationship between school size and proficiency results. Majority of the top districts for Math and RLA based on the assessment results were concentrated on smaller districts. A very brief review of the district names suggested that these districts are mostly charter school districts. As a next step in our analysis we might want to drill down on the student demographics, teacher to student ratio, crime rate, and median income of the zipcodes for these districts to explore other factors that might impact the academic performance. For future works, we would also like to explore other datasets provided by the Department of Education such as graduation rates, school level proficiency rates, and assessment participation rates.