School Shootings that never happened.
I
I am always skeptical when people use statistics. Even accurate numbers can be used in misleading ways. Sometimes it’s just out of ignorance that numbers are misunderstood, but other times the statistics themselves have been deliberately skewed.
How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?
We should know. But we don’t.
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.
25% of the schools that reported an incident did not respond?
The Education Department, asked for comment on our reporting, noted that it relies on school districts to provide accurate information in the survey responses and says it will update some of these data later this fall. But, officials added, the department has no plans to republish the existing publication.
This confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing. Students around the country are heading back to school this month under a cloud of fear stemming from the most recent mass shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas.
At least 53 new school safety laws were passed in states in 2018. Districts are spending millions of dollars to “harden” schools with new security measures and equipment. A blue-ribbon federal school safety commission led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is holding public events around the country, including one in Alabama Tuesday. Children are spending class time on active-shooter drills and their parents are buying bulletproof backpacks.
Our reporting highlights just how difficult it can be to track school-related shootings and how researchers, educators and policymakers are hindered by a lack of data on gun violence.
“I think someone pushed the wrong button”
Really? They pushed the wrong button? I will betcha there is funding available if the number of “Gun incidents” reaches some target goal.
Unacceptable burden
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights received complaints about the wording and administration of this survey even before it went out.
A June 2014 research report commissioned to improve the CRDC as a whole noted that in previous data collections, districts had experienced “unacceptable levels of reporting burden.” They complained that the CRDC asks them to report information that is similar to what states already collect, but in a different format, or at a level of specificity that they don’t currently track.
It is a very interesting article to read and NPR did an exceptionally good job with it. If you find the time, read the whole article HERE.
Category: Guns
Sounds like the Dept of Education employee(s) responsible for that 2014-2016 “study” matriculated from MSU.
No, not Michigan State – “Making Sh!t Up”.
Then again, it’s not the first time we’ve seen statistics that appear deliberately skewed in order to promote the gun
confiscationcontrol agenda. Remember: “mass shootings” deliberately include the shooter in the “body” count if he or she is wounded during the incident.Sometimes doing so is the only way an incident qualifies as a “mass shooting” (4 or more “victims”). Remember, the gun
confiscationcontrol advocates have a vested interest in maximizing the number of such incidents for propaganda purposes.I do have to say that I’m rather shocked to see NPR playing this one straight. I guess they finally realized that the SCoaMF isn’t POTUS any more, and that the political climate has changed somewhat since Jan 2017.
I’m just simply shocked that a government organization would “adjust” data in order to provide false evidence to a currently sitting POTUS. That just never happens, ever!
NPR must be racist, homophobic, fascist, nazi, Hitlers!
I did take the time to read the article. It is clear that the information requested was not properly categorized during the time period (2014-2016) of the surveys. It is also clear that false numbers were reported by Dept of Ed, despite no such incidents in the school districts responding to the survey.
Putting ‘firearm’ in the same category as ‘explosive device’ appears to be an intentional effort by the Dept of Ed to increase the numbers of “firearms” incidents even if the source was a firecracker or a cherry bomb.
The survey is then false, clearly aimed at supporting an agenda by the previous administration, and is not something to rely on if you’re looking for data.
Frankly, there are more street shootings in Chicago than there are in the entire school system.
And even more bloodletting in Chiraq on holiday weekends !!!
Such a wonderful place !!!
Ahh yes Chicongo, clear evidence of what a beautiful Utopia that Gun Control Laws deliver upon a populace!
Let’s see, there are about 90,000 schools in the US, doing the maffs, that give us about a .2667% chance of being in a school with a firearms discharge. Does anyone not think that this is a remarkably small number?
If only 240 schools out of 90,000 returned those surveys, what does that say?
That schools are remarkably safe places? Assuming the 240 number is accurate, which it most likely isn’t. Misread your post. If only 240 of 90,000 schools responded would invalidate the poll. No where near enough of a sample size to makes any conclusions.89,760 surveys were lost or only 240 surveys were sent out. Simple math.
The old, “my dog ate 89,760 surveys” excuse?
Or “accidentally” deleted like a Hillary Clinton email.
I’d say only 240 surveys were sent out, for starters.
Therefore, the survey is not a valid sample. 🙂
Daughter is a teacher in FL. Poor thing spends more time filling out paperwork, “surveys”, and data requests than she does teaching. Her frustration level goes thru the roof, because most of the data is either not ever used, doesn’t apply to what she does, or is used to justify some one’s phony baloney job. She agrees with most of us here. Quit “studying” a “problem” and just fix it. You put a real armed guard(s) at a school, or any other building, and the chance of a shooting goes way down. And don’t whine about the money; they are pissing away more money than 2 guards per every school in this country would cost. I’d say that most of us when we went to school “back in the day” you had a principle, asst. principle, the secretary, librarian, the coach, the lunchroom lady, the janitor and the teachers. Board of education had a Superintendent with an assistant and a secretary or 2. Now look at what all is sucking up at that trough. Less than 50% of school system employees are teachers. Oh and BTW, damn a bunch of statistics, and we don’t need your stinking surveys.
They are doing it to doctors, too.
I ask these questions they force me to ask about smoking cessation.
(As if that had anything to with giving anesthesia)
Then I fill out forms about it.
No one checks them, the patients are lying to me, and it’s a useless waste of time.
I can only assume it’s filed in the computer somewhere and used to generate a report .
I spend more and more of my time filling out completely useless things like this.
I see the nurses do it too, and now the teachers.
The only upside is that now Florida finally passed a law that there will be an armed guard in every school.
Paid “Guardians” at $40,000, school safety officers at $80,000 and volunteer non classroom staff for free.
After the 132 hours of training and drug and mental health screening.
I thinks it’s a laugh riot that the excuses for the false data reports include that some questions on the questionnaire were similar. One, for instance, asked about a gun and another asked about a gun or a knife. I can see how educational personnel can mistake one for the other. Not. Another, as Dave pointed out, was speculation that the wrong button was pushed. Some schools just guessed. In other words, the administrators of the false-reporting schools just took a page from why Jane and Johnny’s SAT/ACT scores suck. The two most important things to take from this are that, despite the egregious errors, the self esteem of the schools’ administrators remains high, and that there are apples, not Hershey bars, in the schools’ vending machines.
Public education is a scam. It follows that those who run it are scammers.
The answer is clear.
BAN BUTTONS!
I’m surprise nobody has yet quoted the remark, oft attributed to different speakers, that
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
extrapolating, the survey is roughly under 0.010% of total schools
People who have investigated some of the actual reported school “shooting” incidents where a shot was fired found they included suicides on school grounds, shootings which occurred on streets adjacent to school grounds which had nothing to do with the school or the students, shootings of school property with BB and pellet guns, and other irrelevant occurrences such as a stray bullet striking school property. So any statistic provided is highly doubtful.
I read the article. One of the so-called 240 school shootings which the incredibly accurate DiFi, senator from Commiefornia, recently reaffirmed, was from Nassau County, NY; it consisted of a student bringing a photo to school depicting him holding a gun in his home.
So, I’m thinking that six-year old who chewed his pop-tart into a mini-pistol profile is likely in this bogus 240 school shootings statistic.