Online Data Inquiry

I began my inquiry by first identifying the largest school districts in California based on the number of students the district serves. From here, I created a simple bar graph that compared the districts and the number of students it serves. This bar graph helps demonstrate how large the Los Angeles Unified School District actually is. Currently, the Los Angeles Unified School District is almost six times as large as the next largest school district in California.

After identifying the largest school districts in California, I created a geo chart with markers. Although Google Sheets is limited to geo charts on the scale of the nation, California's large state size allows the chart to still function as a tool to see the locations of the schools. As can be seen in this chart, many of the largest school districts are close in proximity, and many can be found in Southern California.

Next, I went through each school districts pay scales for teachers, assistant principals, and principals; where I collected the salaries of professionals in the first step of their pay scale. I then created a bar graph and table that contained the salaries of each of these positions. An important note to make is that Los Angeles Unified School District and Oakland Unified School District did not provide public access to the first step of assistant principals and principals in the pay scale, thus these values have been left blank.

Initial observations that can be made from the data include: Corona-Norca Unified School District has the highest starting salary for a credentialed teacher in their first year of teaching, while the Oakland Unified School District has the lowest; Principals in the San Francisco Unified School District had the highest starting salary in the their first step of the pay scale, while Fresno Unified School District had the lowest; and teacher salaries across the state average out at around $52,575.42

I then searched for the cost of living index scores in the communities which these school districts operate in. One of the first trends I noticed was that all of the communities were above the standard 100 with their cost of living index. Additionally, I noticed that the cost of living in San Francisco was above 300, yet their salary remained in the middle of the table. This surprised me as communities with cost of living index scores below 200, had higher starting salaries than San Francisco, such as Capistrano Unified School District and Santa Ana Unified School District. In fact, their appeared to be little to no correlation between the communities' cost of living scores and the starting salary of teachers in the district. Interestingly, the correlation is much more apparent in the cost of living and principal salaries with the exception of Corona-Norco Unified.

I then began to think about how schools' budgets may limit teacher salaries. I discovered that many of the larger school districts in California are operating in large deficits. Interestingly enough, San Diego Unified School District had one of the lowest starting salaries yet had the highest surplus of all the school districts. While the Corona-Norco Unified School District, the school district with the highest starting pay for teachers and the highest principal salary had the 2nd largest deficit (the largest proportionally).