WV County Education Outcomes Prediction (Draft)

1. Why Unemployment Affects Education More Than School Funding

Created by Olivia Staud. Updated April 28, 2025

This is a draft of a report on the relationship between school funding, unemployment, and student achievement in West Virginia. The data used in this report is from the West Virginia Department of Education and the U.S. Census Bureau. I’m using test score data, school spending information, and unemployment rates to see whether economic conditions or school funding has a bigger impact on student performance. Will provide results and stats here in final version.

Load assessment data

2. Data Description

I’m using three main datasets for this analysis:

• Science proficiency scores from WV Department of Education (2021)
• School spending information from US Census Bureau (2022)
• County unemployment rates from Bureau of Labor Statistics

I cleaned the data by removing educational service cooperatives and standardizing county names.

Key variables:

• Science proficiency: Percentage of students meeting standards
• Unemployment rate: County-level unemployment percentage
• Per-pupil spending: Total spending per student
• Revenue sources: Federal, state, and local funding amounts

Load spending data

Load demographic data

Joined data

3. Methods

I’m using correlation analysis to identify relationships between economic factors, funding sources, and educational outcomes.

Correlations

Linear Regression Model

I still need to: - Build a linear regression model - Analyze which variables have the strongest impact on proficiency - Calculate the R-squared value

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  missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed

4. Limitations

• The data comes from different time periods (2021 for assessment data, 2022 for spending)
• County-level data might hide differences between schools in the same county
• The analysis doesn’t account for other factors like parental education levels

I need to add more limitations in my final version.

5. References

Will complete references section in final version.