Charting Diversity
January 01, 2011, 06:31 PM
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Newsweek isn't interested in giving its "Challenge" awards to "selective" high schools, (where the gifted students are)but only in high schools that can take poor students and make them better.[America's Best High Schools: The Elites |Why the nation's most selective schools fall outside the NEWSWEEK list.] As example of a selective high school, they mention the Bronx High School Of Science, which has a "richly talented, ethnically diverse" student body—here is an actual chart of that:
Student Ethnicity
Information about this data
Source: NCES, 2008-2009
Ethnicity This School State Average
Asian/Pacific Islander 61% 8%
White, not Hispanic 27% 51%
Hispanic or Latino 8% 21%
Black, not Hispanic 4% 19%
American Indian/Alaskan Native <1% <1%
You notice that you have to look at the key to see that Asians are represented by blue, et cetera. A more intuitive chart,using the same color palette, would look like this

The 4 percent black population is maroon, Hispanics in green, the rest is self- explanatory. The charts are produced automatically by the Greatschools computer. The first one has the URL I rearranged it to This final chart, based on the exact same figures, is one I made myself, with MS Paint(the red streak is a little iffy, because it's so thin):

Given that the categories are:

do you need a legend to tell you which color represents which? No, I didn't think so. So why is messing around with green and blue?