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In the New York Times article “Racial Patterns Are Found in Recent School Budget Elections,” Sam Roberts explores the connections between race and age patterns and school budget decisions.  He found that:

Budgets tended to fare worse in districts with a large number of white voters and a large number of nonwhite students. And in the four districts in the state where the majority of registered voters are white and nonwhite students make up the majority of the school population, the budgets were defeated.

After analyzing the budget vote results for the NYT, Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge explained that:

In New York, it appears that white voters in districts with large numbers of minorities, and minority voters themselves, often voted against school spending increases…This very well might undercut educational opportunities for such minorities, while depressing property values in districts with a substantial share of minorities. It may increase the statewide gap between blacks and whites in both school performance and wealth.

Click here to read the whole article.

Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge appeared on WNYC’s the Brian Lehrer Show for the wrap up of the show’s Census series.

You can listen to the entire segment here or on the show page.  (Beveridge joins the conversation at minute 30.)

The Brian Lehrer Show has been using Social Explorer maps to engage WNYC listeners in their Anecdotal Census project.  Check out all of their census coverage here.

Muslims and mosques are much in the news with the current controversy over a proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site, as well as protests against mosques around the nation.

With all this attention on them, who are American Muslims?  Counting congregations and adherents can be difficult.  The US Census Bureau doesn’t track religion data–in fact, unlike in other countries, it is barred from asking.  Social Explorer gives you access to the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) data from 1980 to 2000.  Based on the Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS), this is the most complete census available on religion in the United States.

According to the 2000 ARDA survey, New York City had 86 Muslim congregations and 167,259 adherents.  Nationwide, there were 1,209 congregations and 1,559,294 adherents.  You can explore where Muslims are in the New York City area and around the nation on this map.

Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge wrote about the process of counting Muslims and other religious groups for GothamGazette.com.

Since Muslims, whatever their number, are a small part of the United States population they are hard to count. They are also hard to define. Considering just adults, what does one need to do to be counted as a Muslim? Go to a mosque? Pray several times per day? Observe Ramadan? Have made a pilgrimage to Mecca? Eat Halal foods? Those trying to count Jews face similar problems. One definition of Jewish, for instance, is “Feeling you should go to High Holiday services.” By such a definition apparently, it is enough to either go to the services or to feel guilty about not going.

In this article, he also parses the different methods (and problems with them) used by researchers to count Muslims.  Click here to read the entire article.

A recent court ruling struck down Proposition 8, and now gays and lesbians can legally marry.  How many people might this affect?  Social Explorer can help you find out.

Since 2000, the Census has counted the number of unmarried partners, including same-sex unmarried partners, which can be an indicator of the number of people who might take the opportunity to get hitched in light of the recent court decision.

In 2000, 594,391 residents of the US identified as being in same-sex unmarried couples.  That number increased to 700,266–one in seven of which live in California, according to the 2006-08 American Community Survey.

Click the map to explore where unmarried same-sex partners live in California and around the nation.

Italy’s La Repubblica Television recently interviewed Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge about demographic changes in Harlem.  We hope that our Italian fans and admirers will enjoy this news story: