George W. Bush Institute

State of Our Cities

The State of Our Cities microsite aggregates education data from a wide range of sources, serving as a one-of-a-kind resource for education policymakers and advocates across the country.

Working with Collaborative Communications and their client, the George W. Bush Institute, Graphicacy was tasked with creating a microsite meeting an ambitious set of design and technical criteria:
  1. Combine education data from a range of disparate sources
  2. Show users a large amount of data while preserving a clean and intuitive user interface
  3. Design visualizations to allow comparisons within and between cities, while highlighting national patterns
  4. Create a backend allowing users to print custom PDF reports and share custom graphics on social media

(click to view interactives)

Graphicacy aggregated data from over 100,000 schools, transforming data from a range of sources to create holistic presentations of city education performance. The application uses city demographics to suggest similar cities for comparison.

Interactive data displays for over 20 key indicators highlight the achievement gap within each city, as well as teacher salary, pre-K enrollment, charter school trends, and more.

A robust server-side application allows users to download custom PDF reports and create individualized data displays for sharing on social media.

Other pages of the site cater to users looking for in-depth policy guidance or raw numbers.