OSSE releases more school data on students’ neighborhoods

June 1 is National Day of Civic Hacking and a series of DC education projects are planned for DC’s Hack for Change event. In anticipation of this event, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) released some very exciting data about school populations that can potentially help families negotiate school choice.

The latest set of data provides the number of students in each school who live in a specific “neighborhood cluster,” provided there are 10 or more students from that cluster.

This data is particularly useful when combined with other datasets. It can help to answer questions like:

• If I enroll my child in a school outside of our neighborhood, will there be a critical mass of students there from our neighborhood? (I think about this a lot, as I currently rely on other families for carpools to/from after-school activities).

• What is the neighborhood composition of my children’s school? (There are infinite conversations about in boundary/out of boundary on school listservs. It would be nice to differentiate between out of boundary (a block or two outside of boundary) versus out of the ward altogether.

The data will also provide the opportunity for interesting visualizations that can give a picture of DC schools and who is going where. I imagine we’ll discover patterns around how far families have to travel to get their children to school.

Adding more elements to the data, like special programming or lottery results (we’re hoping to get multi-year results from DCPS and charters) could also provide information about the type of “school formula” that seems to attract families. Who knows? I can’t wait to find out!