School Shootings That Never Actually Happened

[Teleute]

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.
...

 

[Muriel Schwenck]

Sounds like the U.S. Education Department has been making busy work for itself.

 

[Teleute]

Ack, I accidentally inserted the link as media, and I’m having trouble editing because: iPhone.

*EDIT* The problem wasn’t me; it’s just automatically embedding.

*EDIT AGAIN* If this doesn’t work, I fucking quit:

https://www.npr.org/

sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent

(Just delete the friggin’ ‘return’.)

 

[Kittyskyfish]

This was a debacle in self-reporting to the government. Somehow there was a massive rate of error caused by either the survey form design, or the data entry. If one line has so many mistakes, that makes me wonder if the whole report is a pile of poop? Excerpts from the NPR transcript:

GREENE (HOST): Earlier this year for the first time, the federal government published what it said was a comprehensive count based on a survey of every single public school in the United States.
...
KAMENETZ: The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights asked every school this question, and they actually made it mandatory for the first time last year. They asked, in the 2015-2016 school year, has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting, whether - regardless of whether anyone was hurt? And that included going to and from school and school-sponsored events. And they published the answer this past spring.
...
KAMENETZ: But in 161 of those 235 cases, we did learn districts or schools told us nothing at all happened. And the biggest chunk of those overall was the Cleveland Municipal School District, reporting 37 shootings. Their best guess is that that number, 37, was placed on the wrong line of the survey.

GREENE: It's just incredible that you have schools saying nothing at all happened, and they're being counted by the federal government as places where there were shootings.

KAMENETZ: Right. So it's a really important question. And it's the first time that they've asked it. And we heard the same kind of errors all over the place. So in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, among 16 very affluent schools, four shootings are listed. And Gail Pinsker, a district spokeswoman, said no one remembers any guns being fired going back 20-plus years. But maybe, she says, there was a coding mistake.

GAIL PINSKER: There was a code that was selected for a student brandishing a pair of scissors.

KAMENETZ: And somehow that got inflated into a gun going off.

And you think that's bad? Just you wait Henry Higgins... Just. You. Wait...

KAMENETZ: So Liz Hill, a department spokeswoman, said first of all, you know, they rely on schools to self-report and self-certify all of this data. They did say that at least five districts have contacted them and asked to revise their data submissions on the shootings. We know that some of those districts got in touch with the department after talking to us. The Education Department says they'll publish an update called an errata, but they do not plan to republish the original document, which of course has been out for several months now.

I wonder how many politicians will refer back to the original document (and conveniently ignore the separate update)?

 

[Kittyskyfish]

Kitty, I believe the U.S. Department of Education is the answer you seek.

 

[Satanica]

This was a debacle in self-reporting to the government. Somehow there was a massive rate of error caused by either the survey form design, or the data entry. If one line has so many mistakes, that makes me wonder if the whole report is a pile of poop?

Again, imho, this type of shit is no mistake. The designers can't be that stupid or that incompetent. If the form is that confusing, it was intended to be that way.

Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant

 

[Teleute]

FEE broke this story first, so I’m linking directly to them.

https://fee.org/articles/facebook-f...flated-government-school-shooting-statistics/

I actually saw this in my reader last night, only I was too irritated to come here and post it. Social media censorship has really been getting under my skin.

No jokes from me today.

 

[GenericUser123]

Kitty, I believe the U.S. Department of Education is the answer you seek.

Definitely not the Politics thread, there's too much of it there already.

 

[JackBurton]

I also read recently that the big mass shooting study the govt has been citing left and right, to include Obama years ago, is completely fucking trash. A superior college professor did his own study recently to debunk it and debunk it he did. The number of mass shootings in America are nowhere near as plentiful as the govt has been leading us to believe.

Social media censorship has really been getting under my skin

What do you expect from Facebook?

I get comments deleted for referring to the criminal stains on trash shows like Sons of Anarchy of awful white trash. That's hate speech. No shit been temporarily banned for that. Meanwhile, the dipshit autistic guy who runs facebook says he has no issues with holocaust supporters and allows them to say whatever the fuck they want on his site. It's amazing.

No surprise the site is Russian operated.