Income, geography and Arizona school grades: Phoenix edition

by David Safier

I've gotten a lot of response from yesterday's post with a map showing the distribution of state school grades across the greater Tucson area. It's the most dramatic visual representation I've seen of what has been concluded by study after study of schools in the U.S. and around the world: income is the primary determiner of student achievement on standardized tests.

I've created a similar map of greater Phoenix. I don't know much about the demographic lay of the land, but I expect BfA readers in Phoenix will look at the way the state's school grades map out and find they correlate to high, middle and low income areas. It's a bit more complex than the Tucson map, which is not surprising since Phoenix is so much larger, but the clustering of school grades is still dramatic.

The color code I used is the same one the AZ Dept of Ed uses for the grades: Green for A, Blue for B, Yellow for C and Orange for D.

You can see the original ADE map without the added colored clouds below the fold.