Project Title: How the Other Half Learns: An Analysis of Educational Outcomes Across the Virginia Urban/Rural Divide
BASIS Advisor: Erin Vander Wall
Internship Location: BASIS Independent McLean
Educational outcomes vary substantially by jurisdiction across Virginia, potentially reinforcing racial, socioeconomic, and geographical disparities in Virginia and undermining efforts to ensure equal opportunity. While geographic or locational factors impacting educational outcomes may be studied less frequently than racial or economic ones, if they exist they pose a major challenge to efforts to ensure equity in educational opportunity. Using seventh-grade math and reading Standard of Learning (SOL) results as an indicator of educational outcomes, I will use regression analysis to examine the impact of race, the economic well being of the county in question, and the location of school districts (i.e. urban, suburban, or rural). The goal of this project is to determine whether school districts are impacted by their location in the same way they are impacted by other variables such as race and wealth. This project seeks to fill a gap relating to the role of geography as it impacts educational outcomes. My hope is that this project may be useful to Virginia lawmakers and legislators, as the analysis that this study will produce may aid in the creation and implementation of policy aimed at promoting greater equity in Virginia education.
My Posts
Week Four:
Mar 31, 2023
Hello again to those people who have managed to slog this far into my project. Given the relative length and amount of work I have put into the last few blog posts, I have made the executive decision to combine what would likely be two or three separate blog posts into one. So, strap in […]
Week Three Part Two:
Mar 24, 2023
Hello there, and welcome back to my blog. It looks like this week has been one of re-examining the things that I thought I knew. I began that theme with my first blog post of the week, and I am continuing it here. Earlier this week, I decided to check whether the Isserman classification system […]
Week Three: Part One
Mar 20, 2023
Hello again, and welcome back to my blog post. I didn’t intend to write up two blog posts this week, but I’ve discovered something important. Last week I was wrong when I stated that we needed to switch over to using Percentage White (PW) instead of Percentage African American (PAA) when we were examining Math […]
Week Two
Mar 17, 2023
Hello there again random stranger on the internet, you are once again reading the blog of Charlie Rhodes. I meant to put this post out earlier this week, but, things and life got in the way. Not the least of those things was the fact that we had to put our cat down earlier this […]
Week One: Part Two
Mar 09, 2023
Hello everyone, and welcome back. Sorry about the delay in putting out this blog post, I meant to release it a few days ago, but it turns out that this post was harder for me to write than I thought. My original plan for this blog post was to go into excruciating detail on how […]
Week One: Part One
Mar 06, 2023
If you’re reading this, welcome back. As a word of warning, this post will probably be a little more dull than these posts normally are, but I feel it is still quite necessary in order to get all the background you need to understand my methods in the rest of these posts. In other words, […]
Introduction
Mar 06, 2023
Hello there, random stranger on the internet, my name is Charlie Rhodes. If you’re reading this, you probably made some mistake entering in some URL or another, either that or you made some other error on the internet which caused you to end up here. I’m not entirely sure how you got here, but welcome. […]