Understanding Access in NYC
By: Aditi Kapre
Tags: Access To Education, Svadsifinalproject19, Quality Of Education, Education, New York City

By Elana Wolpert, Alisha Mahen and Aditi Kapre

Is quality education in NYC linked to race or neighborhoods?

New York City is famously diverse, and also famously segregated. This means that to understand how different races access different levels of quality education, we need to understand how these schools are physically separated, to see if there are any spatial patterns in the way that quality schools are separated, and therefore how accessible quality education is.

In our last post, we mapped how various races have access to quality education in schools, and this time, we will look at the same data set, but look at how different neighborhoods have access to quality education.

By looking at the quality education data with both race and neighborhoods, we were able to see possible correlations and relationships between them. Ultimately, we’re trying to understand if quality education in NYC is more linked with race, or if it’s linked with neighborhoods.

So, we mapped two types of data. First, the Economic Need Index in New York City, and this data set is specifically outlining economic needs of families and children. Second, we mapped out the different types of quality indicators that help us understand what defines and quantifies a ‘Quality Education’. Together, these maps help us understand where New York’s students with low economic stability are, and where the most quality education is throughout the city.

This map shows the Economic Need Index of students in NYC schools. The concentration of schools who have high economic need are schools are concentrated in Northern Manhattan, East Harlem, Bronx and Bed-Stuy area in Brooklyn. Surprisingly to us, some schools in Midtown are struggling as well. The schools with low economic need schools are spread out all over, with trends throughout Brooklyn, and in Upper East and Upper West Sides.

On comparing this map (‘Collaborative teachers’ rating of NYC schools) with the Economic Need Index map, we learned that most schools in Manhattan have great collaborative leadership. Overall too, very few schools lack collaboration amongst teachers. There isn’t, however, a perfect or clear trend.

In understanding schools that have supportive environments, we were able to find a few trends. The low economic need areas that have supportive environments are in Midtown and lower Manhattan.

For high economic need areas, there are approximately an equal number of supportive environments as there are non supportive environments in Harlem. There are very few schools that show supportive environments in Bed-Stuy.

Overall all schools in New York have effective school leadership. However a couple of schools in Bronx and Brooklyn have less effective school leadership.

Trend continues, in a majority of schools in Bronx and Brooklyn they have medium to low community ties, whereas Manhattan seems to have an overall high number of schools with strong community ties, with a few exceptions.

Most schools in Bronx are receiving medium to low rigour in their instruction. Similarly trend follows in Brooklyn.

There seems to be no particular trend with regard to trust within community parameter and the neighborhoods mentioned before. It is however evident that, although majorly spread out, the most number of schools that show low trust are concentrated in the boroughs of Brooklyn and The Bronx.

Overall, while there were many maps that didn’t have clear trends relating space to quality education, some specific neighborhoods showed patterns. Some locations had general patterns, such as the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx and or Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, both received low to medium ratings throughout the different quality metrics.