For my data visualization assignment, I chose to write about Massachusetts teacher salaries, how many teachers are in each school district, and the physical size of each community. I only compared school districts that are contained in one community.
The data is from the state Department of Education, which has information about the average salary of each district’s teachers, the number of FTEs (Full-time equivalent positions). The geographic size of the towns comes from Google.
In the chart(or the link) below, the size of each rectangle correlates with FTE counts — the larger the rectangle, the more teachers employed. while the color, from red to blue, refers to the geographic size of each community, from larger to smaller. So clearly there are several towns with not many teachers, which are physically large.
The image(or the link) below shows how many FTEs are combined in different salary ranges. For instance, the largest rectangle, in the upper left, shows that there are nearly 12,000 teachers employed with an average salary of about $73,440.
About the chart
I think this kind of chart works better than a bubble chart because it shows the sequences from larger to smaller, in order, of FTE count.
What I learned
- This ended up as an academic practice, rather than a story. But I’ve definitely learned something about publicly accessible data and Tableau.
- Start as earliest as possible to decide which topic to write about. I’m going to work on and look closely at the data before making the decision.
- If hit technical problems, seek out help from the library guy.