GIS and Maps

Overview

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) collects and maintains data from districts and schools. This data informs education research and data analysis. DPI provides multiple ways to discover, visualize, and download multi-year education data. These include:

• the WISEdash Public Portal, which allows users to view current and certified data via graphs and tables;
• WISEdash Data Files, which allows users to download certified, statewide data for all public districts and their schools; and
• GIS Open Data Portal, which includes GIS layers, maps, and interactive applications

What is GIS?

A geographic information system (GIS) is a framework for creating, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing data that identifies geographic locations of natural and man-made land features and boundaries. Let's break down the words that make up GIS.

Geographic: Features (e.g. schools) and images in GIS become geospatial when they are referenced to locations on Earth using geographic coordinates.

Information: The information in GIS refers to tabular data with spatial and non-spatial attributes. This is information about the spatial features (e.g. a school’s name, level, and district).

System: The system ties everything together so spatial features are associated with non-spatial attributes in a database.

In addition to mapping the location of schools and district boundaries, we can use GIS to see the spatial distribution of:

• enrollment,
• demographics,
• student outcomes,
• change over time, and more.

Viewing education data through a geospatial lens reveals patterns and relationships unseen in typical tables and charts. This helps us answer questions and prioritize areas for improvement in our education system. Seeing multiple geospatial data layers at once in a GIS environment helps us recognize the context and correlations between different kinds of data.