Graduating from high school is a major milestone in a student's life and often reflects academic readiness for college, careers, and other post-secondary opportunities. Massachusetts is one of the strongest-performing states in the country in terms of education, but graduation outcomes are not the same across all schools and districts.
Differences in graduation rates may reflect broader inequalities in educational access, district resources, and student support systems. Some districts consistently report very high graduation rates, while others face lower outcomes that may be associated with higher levels of student need, economic disadvantage, or other demographic factors.
These differences raise questions about what socioeconomic factors contribute to graduation outcomes. Examining these variations is important because it can help identify how such factors influence student success and contribute to a more equitable education system.
To learn more about Massachusetts education data, you can visit the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education .
Our project uses several datasets from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2017 through 2022. These datasets provide school-level information related to student demographics, socioeconomic characteristics, graduation outcomes, SAT performance, and postsecondary attendance.
The detailed information about the features is listed in the following table:
| Variable Name | Details |
|---|---|
| Enrollment_Gender | Enrollment counts by gender and year (11072 rows × 13 columns) |
| Socioeconomic | High needs, English learners, economically disadvantaged, and related variables (11055 rows × 15 columns) |
| College_Attendance | Percent of graduates attending college or university (2397 rows × 13 columns) |
| Graduation_Rates | Graduation outcomes by school and year (2335 rows × 10 columns) |
| SAT | SAT participation and performance measures (2171 rows × 7 columns) |
In addition to the educational datasets, geographic information is essential for visualizing patterns across school districts. Therefore, we incorporate spatial data from MassGIS , which provides official geographic boundary files for Massachusetts. Specifically, we use MassGIS data to obtain district-level polygons, enabling accurate mapping and spatial analysis of graduation rates and related variables across the state.
The datasets were merged on school and year, filtered to high schools, and cleaned by addressing missing values through removal or imputation to create a consistent, analysis-ready dataset.
The map below shows graduation rates across Massachusetts school districts. Users can select a year from the dropdown menu and hover over each district to view more detailed district-level information.
The map reveals that low graduation rates in Massachusetts are not randomly scattered across the state. They cluster geographically, particularly in central and western regions, where certain districts report consistently lower outcomes year after year. While the overall statewide picture improves over the six-year period, with the map darkening noticeably between 2017 and 2022, those same pockets of lower performance remain visible throughout. This persistence suggests that structural, place-based factors are shaping graduation outcomes rather than isolated or temporary circumstances. In other words, where a student goes to school in Massachusetts has a meaningful and lasting relationship with whether they graduate.
This chart breaks down average SAT scores in Reading/Writing and Math by racial group from 2019 to 2022. Use the year selector to explore how these patterns have shifted over time, and hover over any bar to see exact score values for that group.
Substantial gaps are visible across groups: Asian students score notably higher on average than other groups, particularly in Math, while Black and Hispanic students score lower on average than their White and Indian peers. These differences remain relatively consistent across years, suggesting persistent structural disparities rather than short-term variation.
It is important to interpret these patterns in context. SAT scores are influenced by many factors beyond individual academic ability, including access to test preparation, school resources, and socioeconomic circumstances. The disparities visible here likely reflect inequalities in educational opportunity rather than differences in student potential. Use the year selector to explore how these patterns have shifted over time.
This scatter plot examines the relationship between a district's graduation rate and the percentage of its students classified as low income. Use the year dropdown to filter by year, click and drag to brush a region of interest, and hover over any point to see district-level details
Each point represents a single school district in a given year. A clear negative trend is visible: districts with higher shares of low-income students tend to report lower graduation rates, while districts with fewer economically disadvantaged students cluster near the top of the graduation rate range.
This pattern is consistent with broader research showing that economic disadvantage is one of the strongest predictors of educational outcomes. Students from low-income households may face barriers such as housing instability, reduced access to academic support, and the need to balance work or family responsibilities alongside school. Districts serving higher proportions of these students often have fewer per-pupil resources, compounding the challenge. Identifying these patterns is a first step toward understanding where targeted interventions may have the greatest impact.
This heatmap displays correlations between graduation rates and a range of socioeconomic and academic variables. Use the year selector to explore how these relationships shift over time, and hover over any cell to see the exact correlation value between two variables.
Across all six years, the correlation heatmaps reveal a consistent pattern: socioeconomic disadvantage is negatively associated with academic performance, while academic outcomes tend to cluster together. Math and reading scores are strongly positively correlated throughout, and graduation rates and college attendance move together across the board. Meanwhile, economically disadvantaged and low-income populations show persistent negative relationships with both test scores and graduation outcomes. These negative correlations appear to strengthen around 2019 and 2020, when COVID-19 likely widened existing inequalities. Use the year selector to explore how these relationships shift over time.
This line chart tracks the statewide average graduation rate alongside the low-income percentage. Hover over any point on the chart to see the exact year, metric, and value.
The most notable finding is that graduation rates rose modestly over this period, climbing from roughly 84% to 86%, even as the low-income percentage held nearly flat at around 43%. The stability of the low-income line is itself meaningful: despite minor year-to-year fluctuations, the share of economically disadvantaged students barely changed, suggesting that the modest gains in graduation rates were not driven by shifts in the underlying student population. That graduation improved at all while economic disadvantage remained stubbornly persistent points to other factors at work, whether policy interventions, district-level efforts, or reporting changes worth investigating further.
In this project, we analyze graduation disparities across Massachusetts school districts and examine how these differences relate to socioeconomic and demographic factors.
Across every visualization in this project, one pattern emerges clearly: socioeconomic disadvantage is a persistent and consistent predictor of worse educational outcomes in Massachusetts. The map reveals regional variation in graduation rates, while the histogram and scatter plot show that disparities along racial and income lines are not outliers but the norm. The heatmaps confirm that these relationships hold year over year, and the time-series chart captures a quiet tension: graduation rates have slowly improved, but the share of low-income students has barely moved, meaning the underlying conditions driving inequality have not changed meaningfully.
What this project cannot answer is why these patterns persist and what, if anything, is working to counter them. Future work could examine per-pupil spending and resource allocation to test whether funding gaps explain part of the performance disparity. Longitudinal tracking of individual districts that bucked the trend, posting strong graduation rates despite high disadvantage, could reveal which interventions are actually effective. It would also be worth disaggregating the statewide averages to understand whether the modest gains in graduation rates are broadly shared or concentrated in already high-performing districts. Educational inequality in Massachusetts is not random, but it is also not inevitable, and understanding where progress is happening is as important as documenting where it is not.