Washington State CS Education Dashboard (2020-21)

This is my first attempt to create a data dashboard for Computer Science Education in my home state of Washington.

At the end of May 2023, I stumbled upon the 2020-21 K-12 Computer Science Education Summary Report on the Computer Science page of the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) while doing other research.    As mentioned on the web page: “This report responds to HB 1577, requiring OSPI to post computer science data.”

I was overjoyed to find this report as the OSPI data team was decimated during the pandemic and was just now getting caught up.   Washington’s previous attempts at a Computer Science Education dashboard on the CS for All Washington data website had been severely limited by the lack of a consistent data source before HB 1577 (2019) and halted entirely during the pandemic.   The 2020-21 K-12 Computer Science Education Summary Report marks Washington’s first real chance to create a CS Education Dashboard for our state.

The report provides data from the 2020-21 school year on:

CS Enrollments in Washington

The CS Enrollments in Washington (2020-21) dashboard shows how the percentage of CS Education enrollments varies based on:

CSE Percentage is the main success metric used throughout the dashboard and is the number of “CS Education Enrollments” divided by the number of high school students associated with the entity (school, district, etc.)  The number of “CS Education Enrollments” corresponds to the “Computer Science Enrollments using CIP or State Course Code” column in the Excel workbook associated with the report.   While digging deeper into the breakdown of “CS Education Enrollments” leads to more questions than can be answered through the report, CSE Percentage does provide a solid relative measure of CS education activity within Washington state.

In the “heat maps” of Washington in the dashboard below, larger circles correspond to larger student populations.  In a “traffic light” color scheme, dark red corresponds to none to low CSE Percentages, and dark green corresponds to high CSE Percentages.   In the bar charts, darker hues correspond to larger student populations and the length of the bar represents the CSE Percentage itself.

Based upon the individual data on the 715 high schools listed in the report, 346 (48.4%) high schools had CS Enrollments.   There were 375,307 total students and with 26,663 CS Enrollments for a statewide CSE Percentage of 7.1%

  This dashboard can also be found on Tableau Public

State-wide CS Education Participation

The State-wide CS Ed Participation dashboard show how different demographic groups participated in CS education throughout Washington state in 2020-21.   The dashboard provides breakdown of student population and CSE Percentage rates for the following demographic groups on a state-wide basis:

There is a significant difference between the total number of students and number of CSE Enrollments reported through this State-wide CS Education Participation dashboard and the CS Enrollments in Washington dashboard above.   The state-wide participation data in this dashboard was retrieved from the “State” sheet in the report; the data in the CS Enrollments dashboard was calculated based on data from each individual school on the “School” sheet in the report.   These differences are summarized below:

Despite this discrepancy, I still believe that this data is worth reporting as is because CSE Percentage is important as a relative measure between groups.   The 2020-21 K-12 Computer Science Education Summary Report also provides this demographic data on a school-by-school basis but some of this data is suppressed for privacy reasons.  Hopefully, when the 2021-22 data is released, we can do a deeper dive into any discrepancies and demographic information on a state-by-state basis.

CS Educator Dashboard

The CS Educator Dashboard summarizes the Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Highest Degree Obtained, and Certificate Information for 626 educators from 388 high schools and middle schools in Washington in 2020-21.  

As one who is also interested in getting more – and more diverse – Washington state teachers certified/endorsed to teach computer science and increase CS enrollments, I find the above analysis both disheartening and unsatisfying.  Will need to find other data sources and better analyze these to get a fuller picture of CS Educators in Washington state.

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Source data and further information on how this dashboard was created can be found on Github