(For Chicago Public Elementary Schools, SY 2017-2018)

Per-pupil expenditures have been on the rise on average for decades at both a national and state level. However, academic outcomes haven’t got much better. A heavy reliance on revenue from local property taxes to fund schools means poorest school districts in Illinois receive 20% less than the richest. However, this difference does not always completely account for poor performance. Schools alone are only responsible for no more than a third of educational attainment. The homes and communities have a bigger role to play. As someone with an interest in behavioral economics, I wanted to find out if there was some evidence of the hardships and mindset of scarcity in families with fewer resources (see Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan & Elder Shafir) in metrics for educational attainment.

The Chicago Public Elementary Schools (2017-2018) dataset lacked the detail to do a rigorous statistical analysis to confirm that indeed there is causation, but a high correlation was found between indications of poverty and low math scores for the schools studied. For this project, I:

• Acquired, cleaned and analyzed hundreds of variables in public school datasets from the City of Chicago, the Illinois State Board of Education and US census data.

• Implemented regression models to estimate math proficiency for Chicago elementary schools using predictor variables that determined that family resources and proficiency are highly correlated. In other words, poverty has a tangible impact on academic outcomes for teenagers in the public school system Chicago.