Falling off the math train

Here’s an alarming chart about the education gaps for the first few years of a child’s education. I don’t have any strong ideas for fixes, and don’t even have a strong handle on the underlying problems, but the data is something that should drive discussion.

The Pre-K data is based on WaKids, while the 3rd and 5th grade data is from SBA. This obviously makes this an apples vs oranges comparison (different style of testing might not be comparable), but I found the gap between race to be meaningful.

African American kids are pacing at 87% of white scores in pre-K, but this falls to 49% by 5th grade. Kids are falling behind quickly in their academic careers. Just over 1 in 4 African American kids will be meeting our standards for math success in the 5th grade. When we talk about getting more diversity into computing and the sciences, this becomes a problem. We’re failing at the basics before a child is even 10 years old.

The source code and Jupyter Notebooks are available on my github, the data pulled was from OSPI. I’m still just now really learning Python, Pandas, etc.; if you have tips to make my analysis / code better, please email me. I 💘 feedback.