Continued Analysis into City of Chicago Neighborhoods

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The City of Chicago's 2020 Public School budget can be found here (located in the last two tables towards the bottom of the webpage). Rather than breaking this budget down by neighborhood, this publicly shared information was broken down by "network" with each network containing one to four distinct city neighborhoods. Several of the neighborhoods referenced in the budget tables are not officially designated neighborhoods by the city of Chicago. As such, these rows have been removed. The remaining data can be seen below.
In the previous post, we explored an attribute named Hardship Index, an integer assignment ranging 1-100 and determined by the city. Many different factors (community-wide unemployment rates, poverty rate, crowded housing, per-capita income, etc) are included  in the calculation of this index and the final number is divided into high, medium, and low economic hardship. Since this hardship index is associated with individual neighborhoods and not network of neighborhoods, I have distributed network budgets to individual neighborhoods based on population. Disclaimer- This assumption of population-based monetary distribution affects the remainder of analysis in this document. Therefore, this article should be recognized as conjecture rather than fact. Below are CPS budgets ranked by neighborhoods and color coded by low, medium, and high economic hardship.

One interesting outlier is the McKinley Park neighborhood. This neighborhood accounts for 1.06% of the city's population but 8.66% of the total CPS budget. Exact information is limited on the topic, but Mckinley Park also has roughly one half the number of public schools and students as Auburn Gresham, the next highly funded neighborhood. Again, we are working off of incomplete information, and there are certainly other factors at play influencing this budgetary figure. Nevertheless, this figure heeds an eyebrow raise at the very least.

We will move forward under the assumption that network budgets be distributed based on neighborhood population. In addition, I calculated an additional field that we will call Proposed Budget. This was calculated by evenly distributing the budget to each neighborhood throughout the city based on overall proportional population. Strictly considering the neighborhoods with high economic hardship status, we can see the relationship between the two fields below 



Using this potentially over-simplified metric, four of these six neighborhoods would be considered under-budgeted. The below image shows the difference between true neighborhood budget and our newly proposed  population based budget. 



And here is the budget differential ranked by economic hardship ratings and color coded for high, medium, and low.



These results remain inconclusive. Without a true student population figure for each neighborhood I find this analysis ill-equipped to render a substantive verdict. Nevertheless, I hope you found it intriguing. There will likely be more city of Chicago based analysis to come. 




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