2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 112,220
- 52,455
Yep....here you go....NPR actually did some journalism and found out the number of school shootings given out by the Department of Education was a lie...
Education Department's School Shooting Statistics Wildly Inflated | National Review
But then along comes the Department of Education to amplify everyone’s fears. Last spring it declared that “nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” This number blew through everyone’s estimates, including Everytown’s. Indeed, extrapolated over five years, it would triple Everytown’s.
Well, I have good news: The DOE’s estimate appears to be wildly exaggerated. NPR committed an act of journalism in the first degree and actually contacted each of the schools that reported a shooting to the DOE. It “found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”
So why were the numbers so wrong? Human error. It turns out that when you ask representatives of 96,000 different schools to fill out forms, some small percentage of them will make a mistake.
The genesis of the mistake lies in the department’s Civil Rights Data Collection effort, a massive survey that requires the nation’s schools to answer questions on a range of issues. For the most recent edition of the survey, the department added a seemingly simple question: “Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?” Nearly 240 schools — 0.2 percent of all schools surveyed — said yes.
The NPR report is almost comical:
Most of the school leaders NPR reached had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools.
For example, the CRDC reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California.
“I think someone pushed the wrong button,” said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, “has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn’t remember any shooting,” Davis added. “We are in this weird vortex of what’s on this screen and what reality is.”
There’s nothing weird about this, of course. Give enough people a form, and mistakes will happen. Those mistakes may also be worse the first year the question is asked. As NPR notes, “the law of really, really big numbers” is at work, and the response was well within the margin of error.
But this mistake highlights two things, one related to the challenge of school security, the other to the perception of public risk.
Education Department's School Shooting Statistics Wildly Inflated | National Review
But then along comes the Department of Education to amplify everyone’s fears. Last spring it declared that “nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” This number blew through everyone’s estimates, including Everytown’s. Indeed, extrapolated over five years, it would triple Everytown’s.
Well, I have good news: The DOE’s estimate appears to be wildly exaggerated. NPR committed an act of journalism in the first degree and actually contacted each of the schools that reported a shooting to the DOE. It “found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”
So why were the numbers so wrong? Human error. It turns out that when you ask representatives of 96,000 different schools to fill out forms, some small percentage of them will make a mistake.
The genesis of the mistake lies in the department’s Civil Rights Data Collection effort, a massive survey that requires the nation’s schools to answer questions on a range of issues. For the most recent edition of the survey, the department added a seemingly simple question: “Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?” Nearly 240 schools — 0.2 percent of all schools surveyed — said yes.
The NPR report is almost comical:
Most of the school leaders NPR reached had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools.
For example, the CRDC reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California.
“I think someone pushed the wrong button,” said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, “has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn’t remember any shooting,” Davis added. “We are in this weird vortex of what’s on this screen and what reality is.”
There’s nothing weird about this, of course. Give enough people a form, and mistakes will happen. Those mistakes may also be worse the first year the question is asked. As NPR notes, “the law of really, really big numbers” is at work, and the response was well within the margin of error.
But this mistake highlights two things, one related to the challenge of school security, the other to the perception of public risk.
