McNair Undergraduate Research Conference In September of 2023, I was so grateful to attend the McNair Undergraduate Research Conference at the University of New Mexico! At this conference I spoke about “Education Policy and School Performance: A Data Driven Approach”.

Photo of Natalie wearing a white sweater and a green skirt speaking. This conference was an amazing opportunity to see undergraduate researchers in all fields ranging from physics to social sciences. Here, I had the change to present the preliminary findings of my Master's Thesis focusing on school districts in Colorado, and their board meetings. The first step in this process is to determine, does school funding truly have an impact on student performance? Well, the short answer to this question is no. By testing the correlations for funding and accreditation scores there is nothing that is statistically significant. This demonstrates the complexity of how a board functions, and its impact over the students. Colorado is an extremely diverse landscape ranging from rural to urban, as well as differing political beliefs. This results in a range of school board members with different ideologies about how a school should be run. I argue that ultimately it is the board members which make the most impact on a students education at large.

Future steps for this research are to expand data collection into school board meeting minutes. Thus, it will provide further insight about how money is managed, and the internal politics which occur on a board. The increased polarization, and local control of school boards results in different results in different educational policies. Many scholars argue, this kind of decision making happens in executive sessions, and behind closed doors. This increases curiosity about how gender dynamics may impact personal agendas. I hope to focus myresearch on how board meetings can be utilized as a form of data. Their conversation is archived through YouTube meetings allowing for transcripts and their representaion to be further analyzed. Board discussion is a confounding variable beyond traditional characteristics of recorded education data.