Is the New York City Public Schools the most segregated school district in the nation, as is often claimed? What county has the most segregated schools in the United States? By how much has segregation changed after recent school integration initiatives? IntegrateUSA is a new website — launching at the NYC Open Data Week 2024 — designed to answer these and other questions. Incorporating over two decades of publicly-available school enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data, IntegrateUSA can be used to easily visualize student demographics and track school segregation in all states, counties, and districts in the United States.
At this event, we (Jesse Margolis and Theo Kaufman) will discuss the motivation for IntegrateUSA’s development, demonstrate its use, and talk about the process for building it. We will outline the three key steps in our process: 1) data cleaning and calculation (using R), 2) backend database hosting (using Django and PostgreSQL) on an AWS server and 3) frontend deployment using Next.js and React. We will compare the development of this national tool with its predecessor, IntegrateNY — deployed in Tableau Public — and discuss the pros and cons of each approach.
We hope this event will be of interest to researchers, policy makers, and reporters studying school segregation as well as analysts and programmers who build tools to better visualize publicly-available data. As an initial beta release, IntegrateUSA has much room for improvement and we hope our audience will suggest both what to improve and how to make these improvements. We are grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for supporting the development of IntegrateUSA.