Child molesters for teachers. Felons driving the school bus. Racism manifesting itself with more minority students in remedial classes and fewer in gifted programs.

Education stories like these can be done without years of training or rooms full of computer equipment.

Joel J. Smith, an investigative reporter at the Detroit News, used nine-track tape to compare Michigan's Department of Corrections database of 550,000 convicted criminals with a Michigan Department of Education database of 97,000 school teachers and 15,000 school bus drivers.

He found roughly 200 convicted felons in the classrooms with another 200 driving school buses. Charges ranged from murder to child molestation. Weighing the right to privacy against the responsibility to protect students, Smith pointed to one case in particular: One teacher convicted of molesting a 15-year-old girl served his time, went and taught in another state, returned and was rehired - once again dealing with young girls. "Shouldn't the school district know about this? They didn't," Smith said.

The Department of Education claimed it checked for criminal records. Later the Department admitted it only checked when applicants for a teaching certificate admitted they'd been convicted of a felony. But when Smith looked at applications, he found that "in every single case, they lied."

After the initial computer match, many names were culled by gender or by first and last name checks. Smith used a stand-alone IBM for the initial matches which turned up the 400 names. With the information copied onto a diskette, he put it on an IBM PC and used Paradox software.

In one case, a custodian was fired when he stopped showing up for work. Garcia discovered the missing janitor was in jail for murder.

Dallas Morning News reporter Joseph Garcia found 200 school employees with felony convictions that no one knew about. Using tapes, Garcia compared the Dallas Independent School District's payroll records with Dallas County Prosecutor data, which contains demographics, the criminal charge and its disposition.

Along with dozens of drug offenses, the search turned up three sexual offenders. Garcia discovered in two cases that judges had ruled that employers - the school district - didn't have to be told.

Again, the applications had asked about convictions, but "by and large, the people just out-and-out lied," Garcia said.

Not every successful computer-assisted education story starts with a tape.

Using XDB on a home computer and information provided on diskette, Reagan Walker of the (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger found that test scores more closely correlated with the basic poverty level of a school than expenditures per pupil.

Walker looked for correlations using information furnished by the State Department of Education on diskette for a mere $250. The data included test scores by district, school expenditures by pupil, the worth of a mill per district and the number of courses offered by each high school.

She found a strong correlation between the poverty level and low test scores, high dropout rates and low ACT scores. But Walker wanted to know why.

After analyzing the data, she concluded that schools that had less money offered fewer high school courses and less resources to their students. This in turn meant students scored lower on ACT tests and had fewer opportunities for higher education.

Aleta Watson, with nine years of experience on the education beat, uses Microsoft EXCEL spreadsheets on a Macintosh to bring data together and make comparisons.

Her paper, the San Jose Mercury News, covers an area that includes nearly 50 school districts. But there is no central repository of education data for the area. Spreadsheets help her draw together information from the various districts and make comparisons.

Watson also looked at administrative costs of each district as a percentage of its budget. "It was pretty shocking. Administration wasn't that big chunk [of the budget]," Watson said. Despite solid numeric evidence, "People still called and said there was too much administration," she said.

In 1987 she looked at asbestos in the schools. Loading information from each district into the computer, she discovered how many schools had removed the substance, where asbestos remained, whether it is in classrooms or other areas and what proportion of the schools have asbestos.

A spreadsheet can also reveal hidden segregation. In 1991 Watson used a spreadsheet to look at a school five years after a desegregation court order and found that Hispanics were still more likely to be in remedial classes and less likely to be in advanced placement classes. In building this database, Watson also discovered that half of all Hispanic students have had a D or an F on their report card.

Smith also checked his computer matches using old-fashioned reporting. "I never ran a name that I didn't manually look up and verify if it was the same person. I talked to virtually every person I used," Smith said. In some cases, he simply sent them a letter, and they contacted him.

The final results? Michigan enacted a safeguard law and criminal checks are now run on all schoolbus drivers and teachers.

Jonathan Eig of the Dallas Morning News used spreadsheets to prove racial lines still exist in school. But in this case, Eig used information that was gathered by the federal government but analyzed and released.

"We scooped the agency," Eig said. Using the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division surveys, he found racial differences among the districts in his area in remedial and gifted classes, corporal punishment and graduation rates.

But while the Department requires all schools to gather the information, it collects information from only a few. To obtain the data for this award-winning 1991 series, Eig had to write Freedom of Information letters to the Department and various schools in his district.

Then, using a spreadsheet, he proved a great gulf still divides students.

For example, he found that at schools with predominantly black students, teachers had less experience and few had master's degrees. He also found that the numbers of minorities in remedial classes were up while the numbers of minorities in gifted and talented classes were down - and that minorities got corporal punishment more often. This held true for blacks and Hispanics but not Asians. Looking at the information by district, he discovered that the oft-criticized Dallas Independent School District was more even-handed than suburban schools in many ways. In suburban schools, minorities were more likely to end up in special education classes.

The articles sparked a parents movement and started people talking about the issue, Eig said.

Reporters don't have to be computer experts or full-time investigative reporters to turn out hard-hitting computer-assisted education stories. Even beginning reporters can deal with data that would stump a reporter without a computer.