The Show-Me Institute

As the Show-Me Institute pursued progress in the education system, they created the Missouri School Rankings project to motivate reform. Their goal was to make student performance data more transparent by providing parents, policymakers, educators, journalists and taxpayers with easy-to-understand information about Missouri school districts. They had powerful figures — they just needed a platform.

Paradigm partnered with the Show-Me Institute to transform numbers and statistics into something more palatable. Our team took information from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to create a dynamic interactive map for the think tank. This web application features a state map that visualizes data representing public school districts’ statewide rankings.

Using color coding, our team made it easy to quickly reference top-performing schools in a given area versus low-performing ones. The grades for each subject are also color-coded so viewers may quickly identify areas that schools can improve. The stark contrasts of red versus greens provide motivation to explore the performance gap between schools and ultimately address it.

Our team utilized web applications such as Ruby on the Rails and GeoJSON to create an advanced yet easy-to-use platform. Multi-layer applications run smoothly together without manual interference, ensuring the webpage loads quickly and accurately. GeoJSON was particularly useful in interpreting geospatial data into a simple, geographically accurate map.

Our team built the page to funnel data through various pop-ups and linked-out pages. As a result, location markers for each school are interactive. Each user can click on a marker to receive the school district name, ranking and average school GPA in addition to navigating to a new page that outlines information about the annual funding, average incomes and more.