This geospatial analysis is intended to analyze education statistics across the U.S.

I started with a hypothesis: heavily populated cities would have the highest amount of expenditure per pupil, and the teacher salaries would be the highest as well in the larger cities.

With the data I have available, my goal is to see how educational funds are dispersed throughout the nation. To do this, I plan on looking at teacher salaries, expenditure per pupil, and overall education rates for each state.

I used data from this data set from Linc. I specifically looked at data from 2019 and 2018.

I first looked at the average salary for public elementary and secondary school teachers.

This data points to New York, Massachusetts and California having the highest paid public school elementary and secondary school teachers as of 2019. These top states average about $82k a year.

This map shows the average expenditure per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools as of 2019.

This map is interesting because the highest paid teachers in the biggest states don’t spend the most amount of money per student. These data point in different directions, which I find really interesting.

This data shows the percent population over 25 who has a high school degree

This set of data shows the percent of the population in Public School in each state among the United States. What I found among this data is that the darkest states (the highest percentage), neither had the highest expenditure per pupil or the highest salary for their elementary and secondary school teachers.

After examining these data I started to think about population per state and age groups per state. I found data from National Center for Education Statistics, and came up with a few more conclusions.

This bar chart shows how the total amount of public school students are broken down per state.

Conclusion

It was really interesting to see how even the states with the highest population in Public Schools don’t spend the highest amount of money per pupil. Also interesting how the highest population of high school graduates over 25 aren’t in the states with the highest population overall (California and Texas).

I concluded from these data how population has little to do with expenditure and other factors regarding education in the United States. My hypothesis was incorrect, and my data pointed me in a different direction.