Education, Community, and Housing Open Data Dashboard

Featuring a range of national data related to education, housing, and community demographics and welfare, all data are presented at four geographic levels—school districts, state legislative districts, counties, and census tracts.

Each of the five scenarios below describes a hypothetical use case for one of the dashboard’s main intended audiences, showing how using the dashboard can strengthen the work and advance the goals of the group.

Education Advocates

A public education advocacy group is pushing for an increase in state education funding. The ECHO Data Dashboard allows it to:

• Demonstrate to the legislature that the number of students (e.g., English learners, students with disabilities, and students experiencing homelessness) needing resource-intensive support is rising, necessitating more funds.
• Connect education data to relevant housing data to show a developing vicious cycle: When home vacancy rates have gone up and property values have gone down, schools have struggled to raise money from local taxes and enrollments have dropped.
• Share these data with economic development advocates, who are convinced that without an increase in state support for schools in these areas, declining school quality will drive residents away, sending neighborhoods into further decline and undermining state economic development efforts. With the help of these new partners, the advocates are able to attract the support of additional legislators. With their votes, the increase in education aid succeeds in the new budget.

Housing Advocates

A housing advocacy group is behind a proposed state program that would subsidize the construction of affordable housing near public transit stops. Thus far, the campaign has focused on legislators who are already aligned with the group’s priorities on housing and transportation issues, but the advocates would like to reach new partners. Using the ECHO Data Dashboard, they:

• Match the locations of proposed developments to the school districts where they would be located and identify key education data points (e.g., school funding amounts and graduation rates).
• Determine that these school districts have high funding levels and graduation rates and would provide excellent opportunities to students from low-income families. In turn, the school districts would see increased socioeconomic diversity—a win for education equity.
• Form an alliance with a state education equity coalition, which organizes its members in support of the proposal, using this information. Legislators whose primary focus is education and youth begin to champion the program, and a pilot is authorized in the new session budget.

Journalists

A reporter is writing an article about proposed school closures within the city. She’ll be going to a school board meeting to cover arguments for and against the proposal, but first, she would like to draft the other elements of the story, especially how neighborhood factors might interact with the closures to affect different communities in the city. Using the ECHO Data Dashboard, she:

• Identifies the current racial makeup, poverty level, and other socioeconomic indicators for the local communities that will be affected if the schools close.
• Using the decade of available historical data, finds trends (rising home vacancy rates, diminishing property values, and declining local populations and school enrollments) that have prefigured past school closures in the city.
• Identifies a few other neighborhoods where this process appears to be happening, allowing her to point to neighborhoods and local schools where the data indicate a risk of future school closures.

Policymakers

Senior members of the education committee have become concerned about high rates of student absenteeism in the state’s public schools. They have heard from superintendents that absenteeism is often caused by health factors in the community, particularly chronic conditions like asthma. Committee staff put together a proposal for a bill that would provide grant funding for school-based asthma clinics, additional school health personnel, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, or HVAC, modernization to improve school air quality. Using the ECHO Data Dashboard, committee staff members:

• Identify the school districts that have the highest rates of community asthma and the lowest rates of health insurance coverage, enabling them to design a grant program that includes strong criteria for prioritizing funding for the districts with the greatest need.
• Identify the school districts that would benefit most from such a program and approach their representatives about co-sponsoring the bill, building broader support for the program and this root-cause approach to addressing chronic absenteeism.

Public Interest Litigators

A public-interest law firm is representing a group of families in a lawsuit arguing that their children’s school districts, which serve high-need populations, are underfunded by the state. The lawyers use the ECHO Data Dashboard to find community welfare data for the school districts that provides evidence for their greater costs, like the following:

• High rates of food insecurity, which have prompted many schools to set up food pantries.
• High rates of housing insecurity and student homelessness, which have led districts to hire more dedicated staff to require more dedicated staff.
• Poor air quality and high rates of asthma in the community, which contribute to chronic absenteeism, necessitating costly interventions like new early warning systems and mentoring programs.
• A lack of reliable home internet in these areas means that districts have had to pay for hot spots in order for students to connect and do homework.

This document lists all the variables included in the dashboard and their definitions. It also describes all data sources and data cleaning methods.