Who attends your child's school?

– Powerful new Wiki database has answers

The Bluegrass Institute is launching a powerful set of searchable databases in its freedomkentucky.org Wiki site.

Much of the data has never been available to the public on line before. The increased availability of data ranging from school enrollment to city checkbook registers will help researchers and citizens to better evaluate the performance of governmental agencies.

One exciting new tool in the Web site is a database of the student membership, or enrollment, by race and sex for each public school in Kentucky. Such school-level data has not been on line before. The new database empowers any interested individual to learn about the enrollment and racial breakdown of the student population in any Kentucky public school.

This data can also enable researchers to do more. For example, one year ago the Bluegrass Institute used this school enrollment database and a graduation rate estimation process developed by Johns Hopkins University to create a report that estimates high school graduation rates by sex and race in Jefferson County schools. Such disaggregated data has never been available for individual schools before.

Now, thanks to the availability of this new database, any interested individual can use the same formulas to get a reasonable estimate of disaggregated graduation rates for any Kentucky high school.

The new set of databases contains many other useful reference sources such as checkbooks for school districts. Anyone interested in issues in Kentucky will want to cruise to www.freedomkentucky.org to learn more.