Transparency: How Education Spending Affects Graduation Rates

These statistics are dangerous when displayed in such a simple manner. Statewide per pupil spending has never been an accurate measure given the great disparities of per pupil spending and achievement/graduation within states.  The City of Milwaukee spends roughly $7000/yr per pupil with a graduation rate of 50%, suburban districts spend nearly double with almost universal graduation rates.  The size of the City’s total spending and number of dropouts skews the state figures, despite per pupil being so drastically low.  These skewed figures affect the state averages for all states with similar BigCityPoorSchools vs. SuburbanHighPerformer districts (Michigan, Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, ie EVERY state) and should factor into an accurate visual portrayal of spending and performance.

http://sanitypreferred.blogspot.com/2009/11/throwing-money-at-problem.html

I agree with hifilofi and SanityPreferred that this use of data is highly oversimplified. It is eye catching. And if the purpose is to say there isn’t a clear relationship–that has been accomplished. But this would be much more useful if you used research which controls for factors that affect spending (like infrastructure, salaries/cost of living, etc…). Even a note on what is included in “per-student spending” would be helpful. I love how you display data… just wish you employed sound research methods. 

Is this supposed to be displaying the amount of money each state spends overall per student, or what each state spends that is tied to the education of students (per student)? Or?There are probably a lot of factors involved in this that are not easy to quantify. Cultural memes for example. But drilling down deeper would probably illuminate some of that.SanityPreferred, I like your approach. Correlation is the first thing I thought to do. Since you already did that I did a quick correlation with the graduation rate and $’s/Student multiplied by a cost of living factor … the R squared value was even lower. But it’s worth noting that the correlation between spending per student and the cost of living index is 0.365 … which again makes me wonder what the calculation of spending per student is based on.I got the cost of living data from here:http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/index.stmI don’t know how accurate it is.

Demographic, demographic and again demographic. You can see which states have the lowest graduate rates and everything become right clear.

Now I love infographics as much as the next guy but this one seems pretty frivolous.  Aside from the oversimplification which has been mentioned by others, this infographic has a really low info to graphic ratio.  It took me a lot longer to understand the stats in this format than if it was simply a list.