Education

Lafayette Parish in Louisiana placed the roughly 20,000 children who ride the school bus daily in the hands of drivers with multiple driving and criminal offenses, an investigation by The Daily Advertiser‘s Jason Brown and Claire Taylor found. “The investigation revealed that the school system lacks policies for handling bus drivers who speed, wreck, steal…

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…

According 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…

A 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…

As school sports leaders prepare to discuss new rules regarding booster club spending, Eric D. Williams of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., used data analysis to help demonstrate how money influences a school’s ability to produce winning teams and state champions. The newspaper surveyed state title winners from Class 3A and 4A schools from…

Burt Hubbard and Nancy Mitchell of Rocky Mountain News found that about a fourth of school-age children ages 5 to 17 in Denver don’t attend the city’s public schools. Analyzing data from Denver Public Schools, suburban school districts, private schools and the U.S. Census Bureau, the study found that an estimated 15,700 students bypassed Denver…

Digging through audits from more than 300 charter schools in Florida, Orlando Sentinel reporters Vicki McClure and Mary Shanklin showed the intertwined business dealings that allow school operators to make money on their publicly funded charters by leasing them buildings, loaning them money at interest rates as high as 21 percent and hiring relatives to…

In an investigative series by the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune staffers Matt Doig, Tiffany Lankes and editor Chris Davis expose an epidemic of misconduct in Florida schools. In the past ten years, more than 750 Florida teachers have been punished for misconduct toward students, and at least 150 are still teaching today. It’s possible that the…