Analysis of the Effects of Redlining on Standardized Test Scores

Jennifer, with her partner Sindi, conducted research on the impact of redlining voting districts on SAT scores. Redlining is a discriminatory practice that withholds services (financial and otherwise) from residents that live in a certain area based on race, ethnicity, or income. Though illegal now, Jennifer and Sindi wanted to see if the historical redlining of NYC still affected people today.

They used data mining in conjunction with the statistical tools they learned whilst attending the UChicago Pathways in Data Science program to perform their analysis. After creating their own data set that matched zip codes with redlined districts, they started their analysis. They created scatterplots, heat maps, and bar graphs for their exploratory analysis before using multiple linear regression as their main method for predictive analysis.

They found that they needed financial data to create more conclusive findings.