Goal: Empower decision-makers with reliable data and raise the national standard for data collection and accessibility.
Datasets: Multiple, including the American Community Survey, the US Census, and the National Center for Education Statistics.
Complementing Harvard’s Map of the Month series, Map Monday highlights a data visualization that enhances understanding of or helps resolve a critical civic issue.
Today’s Map Monday is more than a single map, and is actually a visualized “comprehensive repository for Black wealth data” from the Black Wealth Data Center (BWDC). Created and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative, which is a racial equity program aimed at “increasing generational wealth and addressing systemic underinvestment in Black communities,” the BWDC is bridging the Black wealth data gap.
Hosted and incubated by the nonprofit Prosperity Now, the BWDC’s Racial Wealth Equity Database shares data in six major topic areas: Assets and Debt, Business Ownership, Education, Employment, Homeownership, and Population Demographics. There is also a Black Wealth Indicators comparison tool that brings together several county-level measures of wealth from the Racial Wealth Equity Database to provide county comparisons. Data comes from the American Community Survey, the national census, the National Center for Education Statistics, the US Federal Reserve, and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council among other national datasets. This is one of the first, largest, and most detailed data collections that specifically focuses on Black wealth.
The BWDC creators felt that data was usually “hidden behind paywalls, scattered across numerous sources, incomplete, or outright missing,” spurring their decision to build out the Database. Users can download data from the BWDC site, and there is an entire section explaining all the data sources and methodology. After all, if policy makers want to understand and address racial wealth inequality, then there must be a trustworthy, centralized source of information to inform decisions.
This article focuses specifically on the Education data portfolio, as there are numerous graphs, visualizations, and maps within each category — although each topic area is worth its own deep dive. The Education portfolio shows data at the country, state, and local level, so this review will begin at the broadest scale and move down to the most granular level.
While internet connectivity has long been related to educational attainment, the move to online learning since 2020 has accelerated the importance of internet access, particularly for school-aged children. Unfortunately, as seen in the graph below, Black/African Americans are most likely to lack home internet. This has a compounding effect on quality of education, which can lead to inequitable future employment and disparate rates of higher education.
This next graph details the disparity in rates of higher education, as defined by attainment of a bachelor's degree or higher. In this map, users can break down the data by ethnicity and sex to see differentiation even further. While all races have seen gains in educational attainment since 2010, Black and Hispanic Americans have the lowest rates of higher education in the United States.
The BWDC also has similar data broken down by state in another map. In this version, there is also a Black population percentage filter that allows users to “explore the relationship [between] Black population and select indicators within the selected geography.” In order to highlight how important this data is, and why it’s crucial to address the link between wealth and educational attainment with a racial equity lens, the BWDC links several relevant research papers to show how this data can be used. These reports include A Regressive Student Loan System Results in Costly Racial Disparities by Brookings Institute and The Racial Wealth Gap, Financial Aid, and College Access by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Moving down to the local level, this final map examines adult literacy and numeracy by county (literacy is ability/competency to read and write and numeracy is ability/competency with numbers). Literacy is categorized into three levels with level one being adults “considered at risk for difficulties using or comprehending printed material” and level three “considered proficient” in reading and working with text. In the map below, the literacy data from Berkeley County, South Carolina is highlighted; the county is 23.5 percent Black and ranks as level two. As many school districts operate on a county or municipal level, this granular data is crucial for understanding the intersection of race and education on a local level — and for addressing gaps that are surfaced in the data.
Betsy Gardner is the editor of Data-Smart City Solutions and the producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Prior to this, Betsy worked in a variety of roles in higher education, focusing on deconstructing racial and gender inequality through research, writing, and facilitation. She also researched government spending and transparency at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Betsy holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Policy from Northeastern University, a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Boston University, and a graduate certificate in Digital Storytelling from the Harvard Extension School.
