Stephanie Iancu, Aiden FitzGerald and Lillian Sexton

Methodology

Budgets

We decided to start our research with the analysis of various New England state budgets when it comes to education and compare them to the 2024 budget proposal for Massachusetts. Vermont stood out as an example of heavy investment in education and also, when it comes to early education, for its near-universal pre-K program.

Massachusetts state budget 2024 details

Massachusetts 2024 education budget

I downloaded these budget numbers as csv files and added them to Tableau.

For the general budget pie chart, I excluded the “total” column and combined the smallest parts of the budget into a category titled “Other” in order to have only five sections and make the chart easier to read.

For the education budget pie chart, I combined the sections of the budget related to state colleges, universities and the University of Massachusetts into a single category titled “state colleges and universities” to also only have five sections.

Vermont State Budget 2024 details

Vermont State Budget 2024 education information

I did the same thing for Vermont as for Massachusetts and created a circle chart and a pie chart detailing how the 2024 budget will be spent. I was unfortunately unable to find a dataset detailing exactly how much of this budget would go to early education and how much would go to other sectors of the education system (elementary schools, high schools, state colleges, etc.) for the state of Vermont.

I also created a chart that shows how much money Massachusetts and Vermont invest per student. To create this chart, I made an Excel spreadsheet containing each state’s education budget and the total number of publicly funded students from pre-kindergarten to grade 12. I then created a calculated field that indicates how much each state invests per student.

To generate a logical comparison between Massachusetts and Vermont, I then normalized the data by creating a calculated field ([State education budget] / [Total number of publicly-funded students]) to see the amount of money that was invested in education per capita and created a simpler circle chart that shows how Vermont invests considerably more money per student.

Childcare Costs in New England

Despite focusing mainly on Vermont and Massachusetts for this project, we also wanted to give readers an overview of the situation in all of New England’s states. There was no specific publicly available dataset for just that part of the country, so we used this much broader and more detailed one.

Childcare costs in New England initial dataset

The initial dataset I used was provided by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of labor and provides a wide range of indicators about childcare accessibility and costs in all of the 50 states.

The original map generated by Tableau when I uploaded the initial dataset was one of the entire country, but I created a filter excluding all of the states that were not part of New England, which automatically made the map only focus on that region. I then chose to use colors to show which states had higher childcare costs as a share of median household income in order to build a logical ground of comparison between states.

I also made a bar chart using the same colors which provides an alternative way of visualizing how Massachusetts has much higher childcare costs compared to the states around it.

Enrollment demographics and childcare costs

From all of the research we’ve done, it is clear that the crushing expense of childcare, and of many preschools, prevents many women from working, despite their career goals. Using enrollment data from the School and District Profile, in Massachusetts during 2021-2022, I made a circle visualization as well as a bar graph. We used the same color scheme for all of our visualizations.

These visualizations depict the predominance of mostly white, wealthy children receiving preschool education in Massachusetts. 
I originally came across this data while reading the Boston Globe article, by correspondent Kara Miller, about the abysmal childcare predicament of our state. There is A LOT of data on this topic!

After speaking with Jill Ashton, Northeast Regional Administrator for the Women’s Bureau, and delving into the sata found by that department, I gained a better understanding of where Massachusetts stands in relation to the rest of the country.

The newly launched National Database of Childcare Prices, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, provides childcare prices in 2,360 U.S. counties and is the most comprehensive federal source of childcare prices at the county level. It depicts the undeniably exorbitant childcare expenses for families throughout the country.

The data shows that Massachusetts ranks highest for the cost of childcare– Parents spend between $16,000 and $26,000 dollars a year -- that's about 20% of family budgets. Two MA counties, Middlesex and Norfolk County, were ranked third and fourth in the entire country, with Arlington County in Virginia ranking as the most expensive, followed by San Francisco County in California.