Constructing a visualization dashboard to improve educational standards in Arizona legislative districts

The quality of K-12 public education is a perennial issue in Arizona that has heightened in salience over the past several years, with broad public concerns over insufficient funding sparking the Red for Ed movement for higher teacher pay. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to K-12 public school education funding, including a lack of visibility for how Arizona public schools are performing at a legislative district level. Such information is released at a school district level by organizations like the Arizona Department of Education, but much of the information is limited and can be difficult for legislators to parse, particularly when school districts lie on the boundary between two legislative districts. Moreover, school outcome data is often limited to raw spreadsheets for the public and may be fragmented between government websites and educational organizations depending on the metric. Ultimately, this hinders the public’s understanding of the current educational standing. As such, a visualization dashboard that clearly identifies schools and their relative performance within each legislative district would be an invaluable tool for legislative bodies and the Arizona public. It is proposed that a dashboard for Arizona at the district level would increase transparency and availability of public information about these districts, allowing legislators to utilize the dashboard as a tool for greater understanding and more effective policymaking. While there are many positive social implications to be afforded by educational dashboards, this article also points to potential risks of this new visibility without end-user training.