Question

Eastern vs. Western States’ Spending on K-12 Education in 2014

Using the data below, compare how much the states East of the Mississippi spend on their K-12 students with how much states West of the Mississippi spend on their K-12 students. Make sure to create a numerical display (make a picture!), describe each distribution (in terms of shape, center and spread) and answer the question: who spends more?

Data in Desmos (Links to an external site.).

Eastern State	$ per Student		Western State	$ per Student
Alabama	9,028		Alaska	18,416
Connecticut	17,745		Arizona	7,528
Delaware	13,938		Arkansas	9,616
D.C.	18,485		California	9,595
Florida	8,755		Colorado	8,985
Georgia	9,202		Hawaii	12,485
Illinois	13,077		Idaho	6,621
Indiana	9,548		Iowa	10,688
Kentucky	9,312		Kansas	9,972
Maine	12,707		Louisiana	10,749
Maryland	14,003		Minnesota	11,464
Massachusetts	15,087		Missouri	9,875
Michigan	11,110		Montana	11,017
Mississippi	8,263		Nebraska	11,726
New Hampshire	14,335		Nevada	8,414
New Jersey	17,907		New Mexico	9,734
New York	20,610		North Dakota	12,358
North Carolina	8,512		Oklahoma	7,829
Ohio	11,354		Oregon	9,945
Pennsylvania	13,961		South Dakota	8,881
Rhode Island	14,767		Texas	8,593
South Carolina	9,732		Utah	6,500
Tennessee	8,630		Washington	10,202
Vermont	16,988		Wyoming	15,797
Virginia	10,973
West Virginia	11,260
Wisconsin	11,186

Answer 1

In order to solve this question I used R software.

R codes and output:

> east=c(9028,17745,13938,18485,8755,9202,13077,9548,9312,12707,14003,15087,11110,8263,14335,17907,20610,8512,11354,13961,14767,9732,8630,16988,10973,11260,11186)
> west=c(18416,7528,9616,9595,8985,12485,6621,10688,9972,10749,11464,9875,11017,11726,8414,9734,12358,7829,9945,8881,8593,6500,10202,15797)
> summary(east)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
8263 9430 11350 12610 14550 20610
> summary(west)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
6500 8809 9910 10290 11130 18420
> sd(east)
[1] 3515.675
> sd(west)
[1] 2662.431
> par(mfrow=c(1,2))
> hist(east)
> hist(west)

Numerical display of data:

> summary(east)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
8263 9430 11350 12610 14550 20610
> summary(west)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
6500 8809 9910 10290 11130 18420

Here we see that eastern state has maximum average spend on their K-12 students compared to western state .

Mean spent by eastern state = 12610

Mean spent by western state = 10290

Shape of both distribution is positively skewed.

Mode of both the distribution is lies between 8000 to 10000.

Eastern state spend more amount than western states.