A new online mapping engine puts graduation data in front of educators, administrators, policy makers, and parents across the country. Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center has issued a groundbreaking report called Diplomas Count and worked with ESRI, the world’s largest geographic information system (GIS) software company, to produce the EdWeek Maps Web site. The site allows users to see graduation data at the district level and compare school districts and states across the nation at no cost.
“This is a nationwide analysis of high school graduation, an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison,” says Christopher B. Swanson, director of the EPE Research Center. “Education has a strong relationship to future earnings. Graduating from high school is the first step to jobs with a future.” The full Diplomas Count report, issued in June, emphasizes the relationship between education and jobs.
EPE publishes Education Week, Teacher Magazine, Digital Directions, edweek.org, and the Agent K–12 employment service as well as periodic special reports on issues ranging from technology to textbooks and books of special interest to educators. Every year EPE generates a large volume of important data about K–12 education at the state level, which is housed in its online Education Counts database. EPE first released district-level data about graduation for the entire nation in 2006, working with ESRI.
The new Web site uses ESRI’s ArcWeb Services to provide EPE’s graduation data online. ArcWeb Services provides a framework for viewing complex data through a flexible interface, in this case optimized for simplicity. Users can easily navigate to a location of interest, zoom down to the district, explore local data, and click a button to generate a printable custom report about the area’s graduation statistics. The report includes detailed information about the school district and how it compares to the rest of the state and the nation as a whole.
“EPE’s data is always fascinating,” says Charlie Fitzpatrick, co-manager of K–12 education for ESRI. “So many variables influence the picture visible in an overall map. We’re already thinking about ways to expand the data and let users customize analyses to better see the patterns and relationships. School success relies on a host of factors, and it’s easiest to understand the total picture through a spatial analysis.”
To view the online mapping application, visit maps.edweek.org. For more information on ESRI’s ArcWeb Services, go to www.esri.com/arcwebservices.
Source: ESRI