Thursday, August 30, 2018

When NPR says your 'LOTS OF SCHOOL SHOOOTINGS!!' report is bullshit,

you really messed up.  GFZ has a good breakdown of this report, including
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.
...
“When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.
No bloody kidding.

What you have is a report that's absolute trash, true 'Garbage In-Garbage Out', which is being trumpeted by the Usual Suspects as proof anyone who opposes them hates kids, etc. 

So you hear/read someone passing that along, pass THIS along to them.  If they're trusting a report they shouldn't, they'll appreciate it; if they're one of the suspects, they'll hate it and it'll ruin their day.

And a short round of applause to an actual reporter at NPR who did their job.

2 comments:

Old 1811 said...

Since every real school shooting gets wall-to-wall news coverage for at least a week, the idea that 200 school shootings went unpublicized is in and of itself ridiculous. QED.

Odysseus said...

What a sad state of affairs we are at when a couple of days work with a telephone to to check government statistics seems like award winning journalism.