Some people have the naive idea that the national standards data and the decile data will not be put together. Given that at some point in time all data will be available, there is no technical reason to not have merged the data, which I have done in this post for an early release.
Stuff made data for the National Standards for a bit over 1,000 schools available here as an Excel File. I cleaned it up a bit to read it in R, saved it to csv format, of which you can get a copy here. Decile data is available from the Ministry of Education, which I transformed to csv and uploaded here. We can now merge the datasets using R:
options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
deciles <- read.csv('DecileChanges20072008.csv')
standards <- read.csv('SchoolReport_data_distributable.csv')
standards <- merge(standards, deciles, by = 'school.id')
But there are some name discrepancies in the merge, which we can check using:
standards$name.discrepancy <- factor(ifelse(standards$school.name.x != standards$school.name.y, 1, 0)) tocheck <- subset(standards[, c(1, 2, 64, 77)], name.discrepancy == 1) # school.id school.name.x school.name.y name.discrepancy #9 82 Aidanfield Christian School Canterbury Christian College 1 #33 266 Waipa Christian School Bethel Christian School 1 #73 429 Excellere College Kamo Christian College 1 #143 1245 Christ the King Catholic School (Owairak Christ The King School (Mt Roskill) 1 #150 1256 Cornwall Park District School Cornwall Park School 1 #211 1360 Marist Catholic School (Herne Bay) Marist School (Herne Bay) 1 #270 1500 St Leo's Catholic School (Devonport) St Leos School (Devonport) 1 #297 1588 St Francis Xavier Catholic School (Whang St Francis Xavier School (Whangarei) 1 #305 1650 Drummond Primary School Central Southland Rural Primary School 1 #314 1678 Te Kura o Waikaremoana Te Kura O Waikaremoana 1 #335 1744 Horahora School (Cambridge) Horahora School 1 #389 1991 Tauranga Primary School Tauranga School 1 #511 2424 Parkland School (P North) Parkland School 1 #587 2663 Reignier Catholic School Reignier School (Taradale) 1 #627 2841 Fergusson Intermediate (Trentham) Fergusson Intermediate 1 #771 3213 Parklands School (Motueka) Parklands School 1 #956 3801 Pine Hill School (Dunedin) Pine Hill School 1
There are four schools that have very different names in the dataset: 82, 266, 429 and 1650. They may just have changed names or something could be wrong. At this point one may choose to drop them from any analysis; up to you. We then just rename the second variable to school.name and save the file to csv (available here standards.csv for your enjoyment).
names(standards)[2] <- 'school.name' write.csv(standards, 'standards.csv', row.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE)
Now we should try to merge any other economic and social information available in Statistics New Zealand.
Note 2012-09-26: I have updated data and added a few plots in this post.