BetaNYC and the Education Council Consortium present the NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard
In partnership with the Educational Council Consortium, BetaNYC is pleased to announce the launch of the NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard (https://bit.ly/nyc-school-budget), an education advocacy tool for School Leadership Teams to align their resources with their Comprehensive Education Plans. The dashboard visualizes New York City public school financial data that was scraped from the Galaxy Allocations and Budget Summaries websites. On behalf of the Educational Council Consortium, Anna Minsky led this project with feedback and guidance on how this data can be used to inform decision making.
Why did we build this? Public education is essential for communities to foster a brighter future for students striving towards academic excellence. In New York City, 833,181 students were enrolled in public schools in 2024.1 NYC public schools collect and publish extensive data on their financial operations, but this information is not easily accessible in an actionable format to school leaders. Bridging the gap between access to data and visualized analysis, an empower School Leadership Teams to make more informed decisions that support student success and ultimately impact hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers.
How do NYC public schools make financial decisions?
Composed of principals, teachers, parents, and students, School Leadership Teams (SLTs) are responsible for developing Comprehensive Education Plans (CEPs) for NYC public schools each year. Instructional programs that outline goals and strategies to improve student outcomes, CEPs guide school functions and decision-making at every administrative level.
To actualize their school’s CEP, SLTs make calculated financial decisions. Allocations, or school funding, are derived from city, state, federal, and private entities that range in flexibility of use. Annual budgets outline guidelines for how to distribute school money and specify resources for elective offerings, staffing, special needs support, after-school programs, and more, dictating education quality and student experiences. Access to allocations and budget data is critical to determining the classroom environments of NYC public schools. While the NYC Department of Education makes this data publicly available via Galaxy, it is not easily navigable nor accessible for SLTs to compare information for analysis and decision-making.
What data does the NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard display?
To improve access to NYC public school financial data and analysis, the Civic Innovation Lab team at BetaNYC web-scraped publicly accessible data from the Galaxy Allocations and Budget Summaries websites using Selenium-based Python scripts. The allocations and budget datasets were consolidated, cleaned, and uploaded to the dashboard.
Allocations and budget data is updated periodically on Galaxy until the end of the school and fiscal year on June 30th. The dashboard is not live-linked, so to access the most up-to-date version of this data, visit Galaxy Allocations and Galaxy Budget Summaries. To extract and compile your own version of the dataset, access the web scraper code on the BetaNYC nyc-school-budgets-scrapers GitHub repository.
The dashboard also displays enrollment data from the New York State Education Department and public school location information from the NYC Department of Education. Using Python scripts to process and incorporate this data, our team developed comprehensive calculated metrics including per-pupil values and pupil-to-staff ratios to better communicate classroom environments and student experiences. These metrics are displayed from 2018 to 2024 in the dashboard.
Explore the NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard!
The NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard is developed through a user-friendly interactive Tableau interface. Search the four-digit school code of your NYC public school to generate allocations and budget metrics and to explore trends in funding and spending, allocation sources, and student-to-staff ratios at the school and district levels.
Don’t know your four-digit school code? Reference our School Code Lookup Table using your borough and neighborhood to find information on your school.
Curious about a specific allocation category? Utilize Tableau’s interactive filtering features to explore the Funding by Allocations Category and District-Wide Allocation Categories Comparison for 2024 graphs in greater detail!
For additional resources and a comprehensive key terms dictionary, visit the About page to learn more about the project and NYC public schools.
Through the NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard, the Education Council Consortium and BetaNYC hope that School Leadership Teams find it easier to harness data to assess their Comprehensive Education Plans and compare their school’s financials with other schools’ in their district. Ultimately, we look forward to this bolstering student outcomes, increasing resource allocation efficiency, and promoting greater accountability in education policy.
After exploring the dashboard, please take a moment to share your feedback with us to help inform further dashboard development. We look forward to hearing about how you are using the tool!
This project was designed and developed by BetaNYC’s Civic Innovation Lab team in collaboration with the Education Council Consortium, through a service called Research and Data Assistance Request (RADAR). The NYC Public School Allocations and Budget Dashboard project team at BetaNYC Civic Innovation Lab is led by Ashley Louie, Erik Brown, Audrey Leung, and Zhi Keng He. To learn more about RADARs and how to submit a request, visit: beta.nyc/radar.
References
- New York State Education Department. 2024. Accessed April 17, 2024. [https://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/statistics/enroll-n-staff/home.html] ↩︎