This study captures the impact of school choice decisions by comparing the racial composition of the district schools students exited to the charter schools they entered. Charter school catchment areas are operationalized using a statewide student-level database to track school attendance patterns of individual students over 4 years. Charter elementary school choosers enter charter schools that are more racially segregated than the district schools they exited, although on entrance into high school, choosers enter charter schools that are as racially segregated or more integrated than the district schools they exited. In addition, racial segregation patterns are the result of White flight and Black and Native American students self-segregating into charter schools that are more racially isolated than the district schools they exit.

BackgroundWe introduce BPG, a framework for generating publication-quality, highly-customizable plots in the R statistical environment.ResultsThis open-source package includes multiple methods of displaying high-dimensional datasets and facilitates generation of complex multi-panel figures, making it suitable for complex datasets. A web-based interactive tool allows online figure customization, from which R code can be downloaded for integration with computational pipelines.ConclusionBPG provides a new approach for linking interactive and scripted data visualization and is available at http://labs.oicr.on.ca/boutros-lab/software/bpg or via CRAN at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BoutrosLab.plotting.generalElectronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2610-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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We introduce BPG, an easy-to-use framework for generating publication-quality, highly-customizable plots in the R statistical environment. This open-source package includes novel methods of displaying high-dimensional datasets and facilitates generation of complex multi-panel figures, making it ideal for complex datasets. A webbased interactive tool allows online figure customization, from which R code can be downloaded for seamless integration with computational pipelines. BPG is available at http://labs.oicr.on.ca/boutros-lab/software/bpg . CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/156067 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 26, 2017; BPG P'ng et al. Page 3 of 8Biological experiments are increasingly generating large, multifaceted datasets. Exploring such data and communicating observations is, in turn, growing more difficult and the need for robust scientific datavisualization is growing rapidly 1,2,3,4 . Myriad data visualization tools exist, particularly as web-based interfaces and non-R-based local software packages. Unfortunately these do not integrate easily into R-based statistical pipelines such as the widely used Bioconductor 5 . Within R, visualization packages exist, including base graphics 6 , ggplot2 7 , lattice 8 , Sushi 9 , circlize 10 , multiDimBio 11 , NetBioV 12 , GenomeGraphs 13 and ggbio 14 . These lack publication-quality defaults, contain limited plot types, provide limited scope for automatic generation of multi-panel figures, are constrained to specific data-types and do not allow interactive visualization.Good visualization software must create a wide variety of chart-types in order to match the diversity of datatypes available. It should provide flexible parametrization for highly customized figures and allow for multiple output formats while employing reasonable, publication-appropriate default settings, such as producing high resolution output. In addition, it should integrate seamlessly with existing computational pipelines while also providing an easily intuitive, interactive mode. There should be an ability to transition between pipeline and interactive mode, allowing cyclical development. Finally, good design principles should be encouraged, such as suggesting appropriate color choices and layouts for specific use-cases. To help users quickly gain proficiency, detailed examples, tutorials and an application programming interface (API) are required. To date, no existing visualization suite fills these needs.To address this gap, we have created the BPG library, which is implemented in R using the grid graphics system and lattice framework. It generates a broad suite of chart-types, ranging from common plots such as bar charts and box plots to more specialized plots, such as Manhattan plots (Figure 1; code is in Supplementary File 1).

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to assess if students enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage compared to students who make other types of schoolchoice decisions, such as transferring between district schools, from a charter to a district school, or staying in the same school. We assess the demographic and academic characteristics of students prior to choosing to attend a charter school in comparison to students who made other types of school-choice decisions and broaden the operational definition of a ''disadvantaged'' student when exploring differences between charter and district students to include academic achievement prior to entering a school. Methods. The analysis is conducted with student-level panel data and a progressive series of ANCOVA models that were estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. This methodology allows for a comparison of the mean differences in academic achievement among students who made different types of school-choice decisions while controlling for student-level covariates. Results. Students who transferred from district to charter schools had the lowest levels of prior academic achievement compared to students who made other types of choice decisions. Conclusions. When Arizona charter authorizers face the deluge of renewal decisions that are approaching, the quality of education available to the next generation of charter school students is at stake. Renewal decisions will impact what choices are available going forward and, given the comparative academic disadvantage of charter school students prior to entering, those decisions should take into consideration the starting point for students entering charter schools.As the charter school movement continues to mature, the national debate has shifted away from arguments about the existence of charter schools as a viable sector of public education, to the question of whether charter schools can live up to their original promise of improving public education through accountability and competition. Charter schools are n Direct correspondence to