We supported The Education Trust—New York on two data visualization projects that make New York State high school data transparent and accessible to families.
The first is a data visualization tool that shows the percentage of seniors with a completed Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in each public high school in each school district in New York State. Consider that 90% of high school seniors who complete the FAFSA go on to college immediately after graduation, compared with 55% who do not. Not only does this tool lead families to more successful schools, it also builds urgency around improving FAFSA completion rates.
The second project is a “To & Through” data visualization tool that allows parents to learn how well a particular high school is doing in educating students to succeed in and graduate from college. (We know that one of the best measures of a high school is whether its students earn a college degree, not whether they graduate or just matriculate at college.) Prior to this project, there was no such public data tool for New York families.