Blog
Teachers cheat to improve their students’ scores on the high stakes achievement tests, a review of documents by the San Francisco Chronicle found. Although “schools admitted outright cheating in about two-thirds of the cases,” cheating is likely more widespread than the numbers indicate, since the California Department of Education currently relies on schools to investigate…
Read MoreAccording to a USA Today report by Brad Heath, “Since 2000, roughly 450,000 people — enough to populate a city the size of Atlanta — moved to Western areas endangered by wildfires.” Heath’s analysis combined historical fire data from the USGS Forest Service, Census population data, fire modeling software used by researchers and a wild…
Read MoreAccording to a report by Ron French of The Detroit News “Michigan’s school retirement system is riddled with loopholes and slipshod policies costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and driving the state’s public education system toward financial crisis.” In the 2006-07 school year, the cost of retirement benefits per student was $1,015 — more…
Read MoreLeisa Zigman of KSDK-St. Louis reports on sex offenders living near schools in the St. Louis metro area. KSDK’s investigation found that, despite stringent laws, more than 100 sex offenders were living within 1,000 feet of schools because of failure to enforce existing laws. “According to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, from 2004 through 2006,…
Read MoreJennifer LeFleur, computer-assisted reporting editor for The Dallas Morning News writes a online column every other week that helps readers understand how they can access, and benefit from, public records. An archive of her past columns can be found here.
Read MoreA four-part series by Sarah Carr of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicates that violence in the Milwaukee Public Schools system is “intensifying.” The stories show that gun seizures have doubled, and a quarter of the 300 teachers attacked every year go on to file worker’s compensation claims against the district. A review of daily police…
Read MoreReporters Susanne Rust and Cary Spivak of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailed conflicts of interest involving the Constella Group, a private health research company that performs hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work for the federal government while also representing major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. The reporters analyzed federal…
Read MoreThe Center for Public Integrity has taken a look at the state of Superfund sites throughout the US. Twenty-seven years after the government developed a program to identify and clean up the worst of these sites, toxic waste remains a problem across the country. “A one-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity reveals the…
Read MoreBrent Schrotenboer of The San Diego Union-Tribune reports on an investigation into hundreds of news reports and public records since 2000 to compile an unofficial list of 308 arrests and citations involving NFL players for all offenses except speeding tickets. The paper “found that the league’s biggest problems with the law are in many ways…
Read MoreGreg Gordon of McClatchy’s Washington, D.C., bureau, reports that the Bush administration tried to curb voter turnout in critical battleground states over the last six years, based on information from written documents and former department lawyers. As Democratic groups amped up voter registration, the administration increased claims of election fraud and created more stringent voter…
Read More