Project Overview
This digital humanities project examines how variations in public school funding influence teacher retention and student academic performance across the United States. By integrating historical and contemporary datasets—encompassing funding allocations, teacher demographics, and student outcome metrics—our goal is to identify systemic patterns that shape educational equity.
Project Levels
Sources : The sources being used in our project come from the National Education Association. We are using data describing state rankings in 2023 and school statistics from 2024. Our main piece of data describes the shift in teacher salary from the 2021-22 school year to the 2022-23 school year. It also includes state rank from both years and percent change in salary. This information is provided by the state departments of education. We also use other sources to provide a narrative perspective on student achievement and teacher experience. We decided to use these sources because analyzing differences in salary, student performance, and political affiliation will help support our argument that there are deeper, policy-driven and regional disparities in education funding.
Processing : We leverage digital tools such as data visualization, GIS mapping, and machine learning to build an interactive platform. This platform empowers users to explore correlations between financial investments in education and key indicators, including teacher turnover rates, standardized test scores, graduation rates, and college admissions. We chose to use these tools for clear data visualization because establishing these correlations will help us argue that there are deeper systemic inequities impacting educational quality.
Presentation : We used the content-management software WordPress to design and manage our website. This allowed us to have a lot of control of the final look and design of the site. Additionally, we used the website builder Colibri along with WordPress, which helped us design and customize our website more easily.
Nadine Cetinyan
Project Manager
I am a third-year majoring in mechanical engineering. I am from Los Angeles. As the project manager I am responsible for maintaining good group communication and evenly distributing tasks.
Eli Sepulveda
Web Designer
I am an International Development Studies major and Digital Humanities minor at UCLA. My areas of interest are in economic resilience and catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. As the web designer, I oversee the functionality of the site.
Quentin Mei
Data Specialist
Third-year student majoring in Statistics and Data Science. Also have a double major in psychology. K-Pop lovers and extreme foodie! As the data specialist, I make sure our data set is clean, comprehendible, and accurately represented.
Keivan Bolouri
Data Visualization Specialist
Third-year Data Science major (Math minor), originally from Iran. I create interactive map visualizations and data stories that turn raw data into actionable insights.
Nithya Iyer
Content Developer
Hi, I’m Nithya Iyer, a second-year UCLA student majoring in Statistics and Data Science. As the Content Developer, I oversaw the development of the site’s main narrative, making sure the written content flowed well with the data visualizations and maps. I wrote section headers and captions, found and embedded relevant images, and helped shape the overall storytelling style.
Katie Lai
Editor
My name is Katie Lai and I am a third year Human Biology and Society major, minoring in Entrepreneurship! I am from the Bay Area and love playing spike ball with my friends. As the editor, I am responsible for making sure the website and our assignments are polished and accurately represent our narrative.
Acknowledgments
Dr. Nicholas Sabo: for guiding us and introducing us to digital humanities. We have applied all that we have learned to this project and will continue to use these valuable skills in the future. Thank you for a wonderful course!
Julia Stoddard: for helping us through every step of our project, and always being there when we needed guidance. Thank you for being so supportive and understanding!