Since one of my children is getting close to middle school, that puts high school on the radar. As a result, we decided to narrow our search to high schools because it would probably get too complicated to also include elementary schools (in addition to all the other factors, such as proximity to transit, ambiance and so on).
In an attempt to narrow down the number of neighbourhoods that we are considering we thought it best to look at schools. I know that there is the idea of fit, finding the best school for that child. However I thought it would be interesting to look at objective measures.
Interestingly I found an open data set on Ontario open data This had not only addresses, but also their level (high school or elementary school) percentage of students identified as gifted, percentage of grade nine students achieving the provincial standard in mathematics, percentage of grade 10 that passed their OSSLT on their first attempt.
There was also a bunch of other factors that I don’t care about, like percentage of students whose first language is not English (kids are in French school at the moment) and percentage of children who live in low-income households. Interestingly, these are all things that I’ve heard the Fraser institute factors in to their ranking. So I think what I found is an older version of a typical dataset that the Fraser institute works with.
You can also download slightly older data from the Fraser institute, but getting the two datasets to link is a manual process, so it’s not feasible for the GTA. Plus the address data for the Fraser institute is limited to the city level (and in the case of “Toronto” is too big to be meaningful).
So going with the more detailed and more interesting open government set, I chose factors that related to high school, based around academic performance. Preferably a French school, but potentially immersion as a second choice. Also, the west end of Toronto and Mississauga are on our short list, so the Tableau default view takes that into account.
I needed to use jitter for geolocation because, unfortunately Tableau only goes with FSA for Canadian postal codes, so you lose precision. Also, some schools are pretty much the same address (École secondaire Toronto ouest and ESC Frère-André for example). There is a good tutorial on the Tableau support site.
I also saw some weird stuff in the data: the percentage of gifted students at some schools are in excess of 30%, which seems really high (not represented in the viz). Things to dig into at a later time.
