tidykids

The not-for-profit organization the Urban Institute created an incredible dataset on State-by-State Spending on Kids that is available here. This data package provides this dataset through R. It is formatted as tidy data to facilitate analysis within the tidyverse suite of R packages.

Installation

You can install {tidykids} only from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("jrosen48/tidykids")

Use

First, load the {tidykids} package:

Then, type tidykids to load the data:

tidykids
#> # A tibble: 23,460 × 6
#>    state                variable year       raw   inf_adj inf_adj_perchild
#>    <chr>                <chr>    <chr>    <dbl>     <dbl>            <dbl>
#>  1 Alabama              PK12ed   1997   3271969  4665308.             3.93
#>  2 Alaska               PK12ed   1997   1042311  1486170              7.55
#>  3 Arizona              PK12ed   1997   3388165  4830986.             3.71
#>  4 Arkansas             PK12ed   1997   1960613  2795523              3.89
#>  5 California           PK12ed   1997  28708364 40933568              4.28
#>  6 Colorado             PK12ed   1997   3332994  4752320.             4.38
#>  7 Connecticut          PK12ed   1997   4014870  5724568.             6.70
#>  8 Delaware             PK12ed   1997    776825  1107629.             5.63
#>  9 District of Columbia PK12ed   1997    544051   775730.             6.11
#> 10 Florida              PK12ed   1997  11498394 16394885              4.45
#> # ℹ 23,450 more rows

Note that:

  • state refers to the United States state (including the District of Columbia)
  • year refers to the year
  • raw refers to the raw amount spent
  • inf_adj refers to the amount transformed to be in 2016 dollars for each year spent
  • inf_adj_per_child refers to the amount transformed to be in 2016 dollars for each year per child in $1000s spent

Detailed descriptions of the variables in the dataset (see the variable column) are available in the tidykids-codebook vignette.

Example

The data can prepared for other analyses or be visualized, as below:

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)
library(ggplot2)

tidykids %>% 
  filter(variable %in% c("PK12ed"),
         state %in% c("Alabama", "Florida", "Georgia", "Mississippi", "North Carolina", "South Carolina", "Tennessee", "Virginia")) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = inf_adj_perchild, color = state, group = state)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_line() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust=1)) +
  scale_color_brewer(type = "qual") +
  xlab(NULL) +
  ylab("$1000s") +
  labs(title = "Elem. and secondary education expenditures per child",
       subtitle = "For select states in the Southeastern United States")

Shiny

An interactive Shiny web application is available here: https://jmichaelrosenberg.shinyapps.io/tidykidsshiny/

Attribution

The data was made available by and is attributable to Julia Isaacs, Eleanor Lauderback, and Erica Greenberg under the under the [ODC Attribution License](https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/.