Alabama Isn’t Last in Everything Education – See for Yourself

EdSource, a nonpartisan California nonprofit founded in 1977, has created and shared an amazing data visualization tool to allow folks to compare education data variables among states.

It’s called “States in Motion”. What is it?  From their web site:

How does California’s investment in public education compare with that of other states? How has that investment changed over time? How does the level of spending look when compared with datasets like a state’s per-capita income, teacher salaries and students-per-teacher? And what’s the correlation, if any, between state spending on education and student test scores?

“States in Motion” explores 16 different datasets, including NAEP test scores, teacher salaries and student enrollments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. To get you started, “States in Motion” poses a series of questions, and attempts to answer them by comparing different datasets (scroll down below the chart to see the discussion of the question). But feel free to play with the different data and variables that interest you, and let us know what you think.

Alabamians can use it, too, to help understand where our public education system stands in comparison with other states.

And we’re not last in everything education! See for yourself.

We certainly have a long way to go to improve the results of our public education system. At least we have some ways to easily better compare ourselves, if you’re into comparisons, that is.

We need more of this. Better data. Meaningful data.

And we need to understand and own what it tells us. The good and the bad.

EdSource deserves a Data Visualization Oscar, in my opinion. Well done.