Kindergarten Lottery Online Database

Couldn’t find a way to simply put a link up on top of the page, so here is the full-blown page. ;)

http://lottery.cb-pta.com/lottery/


This is my attempt to make the Unit 4 Kindergarten Lottery data available and accessible.


9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Kindergarten Lottery Online Database”

  1. charlesdschultz Says:
    15 April 2011 8:36 am at 8:36 am

    I am trying to engage the Board in a discussion about whether or not it would be a good idea to bring this process in-house. Here are the pros and cons as I see them.

    PROS of Unit 4 administrating the Lottery

    • Faster turn-around; maybe even all online
    • No more “black box” magic – we know exactly what is going on
    • Reduce or eliminate line-item budget for EnrollEdu

    CONS of Unit 4 administrating the Lottery

    • Not sure if our current IT staff has the time or resources to implement this
    • One huge benefit of outsourcing the Lottery is that it is 3rd party and unbiased
    • Another benefit is that Dr. Alves usually does an analysis of patterns.

    When writing up those CONS, I could not help but think “You know, we have this little University of Illinois right here in our backyard….”

  2. Julie G Says:
    6 January 2013 12:42 pm at 12:42 pm

    Do you have the data for 2012 broken down on your lottery database page in the same way as 2009-2011? I’m having trouble finding more details from 2012,but I know I saw them on here somewhere back in May or so :)

  3. charlesdschultz Says:
    6 January 2013 12:55 pm at 12:55 pm

    Julie,

    I have the data, but I was having trouble writing the code to go against the database (I think I have a typo somewhere). I’ll look at it later today and see if I can get it to work. If you want the raw data, I can provide an excel spreadsheet for you.

  4. charlesdschultz Says:
    6 January 2013 2:15 pm at 2:15 pm

    Julie,

    A couple of canned queries plus access to write your own queries:
    http://lottery.cb-pta.com/lottery/2012/

    Here is a visualization of choice selections for 2012:
    http://lottery.cb-pta.com/test/visualize_2012.html

    And here is the same visualization for 2011 for comparison:
    http://lottery.cb-pta.com/test/visualize_2011.html

  5. Tara Says:
    13 January 2013 11:45 pm at 11:45 pm

    Maybe I’m asking an obvious question. How do we arrive at the “total assigned” and “available seats” columns in the 2012 kindergarten lottery data? For example, if there are 69 total seats at South Side and only 21 were assigned, how come the assignment was 100 % (47 first choices were made). Why are the “available seats” numbers different in the two questions?

  6. charlesdschultz Says:
    14 January 2013 6:26 am at 6:26 am

    Tara,

    Excellent question! :) The fact is that I have an error in my query, so thank you very much for pointing that out – I will fix it later today. If you look at the 2011 version, you will see that the number of assignments makes a lot more sense. You will also notice that schools like Dr. Howard and Kenwood still had 23 open seats (again, 2011) after the initial assignment. One more caveat is that the data I receive from Unit 4 is a mere snapshot from early April, and does not tell the entire story based on changes made in May, June, July, etc.

  7. charlesdschultz Says:
    15 January 2013 8:26 am at 8:26 am

    Tara, I have fixed the query – apparently the data itself was incorrect for a particular column, so I am bypassing the bad column. Note that unit 4 still has “dirty data” – there were more students assigned to Carrie Busey than they had capacity for, thus showing “total available” as -1. South Side is showing as 62 assigned out of 69 seats.

  8. Tara Says:
    16 January 2013 10:37 am at 10:37 am

    Thanks! It makes more sense now :)

  9. Julie Says:
    16 January 2013 12:08 pm at 12:08 pm

    Thank you!


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