This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
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 2015-16 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” That 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 the 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.
Read the rest of this story at WHYY NEWS