My first project after boot camp began on the day I returned to the office. Rod Murphy, the associate editor, told me that our education reporter had been trying to determine how various schools had compared in their standardized achievement-test results, that had just become public under a new state law.
The reporter, Gary Jahrig, had been overwhelmed by paperwork he'd received from the state Office of Public Instruction, nearly 200 pages, covering many of the schools in our circulation area, and wasn't sure how to make sense out of the data. I suggested that we could get the Office of Public Instruction to give us the file for the entire state of Montana in computerized form.
Training results
I'd attended training at NICAR in early January. I had previous experience, but the NICAR training had been useful for several reasons: it helped me learn to use the latest software; it gave me experience in combining databases; and it provided valuable advice about obtaining and using data from government sources.
When I contacted the Office of Public Instruction, I negotiated an appropriate price for the material: no charge.
The data was on a spreadsheet file, for Lotus 1-2-3. I moved the material to Excel, and from there to Access.
I wanted to identify the schools from particular counties, but the Office of Public Instruction had used code numbers instead of county names. I got a list of the code numbers for each county, and quickly created a database with three fields: the code number, the county name and a designation that indicated whether the county was in the circulation area of our newspaper.
Producing in Access
Once I linked my database to the material supplied, I could easily identify schools in our circulation area and compare their results to the state as a whole. The data covered test results from the fourth, eighth and eleventh grades, showing an average score for each school in each of five subject areas: reading, language arts, math, science and social studies.
Using the Access database manager, I produced tables for each subject at each grade level. My tables listed every school in our circulation area, ranked in order of scores from highest to lowest. The tables included four fields: the school, its county, the score, and the number of students who had taken the test.
Package delivery
A package was published in the Sunday paper. Jahrig wrote the wrap-up story. After interviews with the state superintendent of public instruction and others, he wrote about the test results, the reaction and controversy relating to the use of standardized testing. Another reporter, John Stromnes, wrote a sidebar focusing on one elementary school that had been especially successful. I helped deal with the table and wrote explanatory articles to accompany them. I also made numerous checks and re-checks to make sure I had not asked Access the wrong questions.
The package was published on Jan. 25. My last day at boot camp was Jan. 9.
I already have three other database projects underway. Two involve data I brought home from NICAR.