Introduction

Hello there, random stranger on the internet, my name is Charlie Rhodes.

If you’re reading this, you probably made some mistake entering in some URL or another, either that or you made some other error on the internet which caused you to end up here. I’m not entirely sure how you got here, but welcome.

For some context of which you are most likely already aware, I am a senior at Basis Independent McLean and this is my Senior Project Blog (never mind the fact that I’m doing AP Research so that name doesn’t even make sense in my case). The Senior Project (as the name suggests) is a project undertaken by Seniors. It takes up the whole third trimester at the end of which we have a paper and we perform a presentation of our results. One core part of the Senior Project is documenting our process, which is what this blog is meant to do.

Now, with the background out of the way, let me introduce my project (you’ve probably already read the abstract so i’ll keep this brief). In this project I will be examining learning outcomes in Virginia (as measured by publicly available SOL pass rates) from 2015 to 2019 and how they vary based on just how urban or rural a county or city is. In order to ensure that my results were actually modeling real life and what’s going on in it, I decided to control for both race and economic status. In order to do this, I will collect a large amount of data on all of these factors, and I will utilize STATA to analyze the collected data.

In later blogs I will go into depth about the variables I’m using to model each category and why (for example, the reason why I am using the Isserman classification system for counties, as opposed to literally anything else), and I intend to do exactly that for each category in an upcoming blog post, but this is just the introduction, and the introduction is meant to be a bit less dull than the rest of my project, not more. I’m looking forward to sharing my results with all of you in the coming weeks.