Oregon education officials have emphatically touted our state's public schools as among the very best in the world, and parents in most Portland suburbs say they moved to their particular part of our metro area for the great schools.
But our newspaper was able to use computer-assisted reporting, supplemented with a lot of in-the-field reporting, to establish that Oregon's suburban schools are in fact overwhelmingly mediocre - and to name which schools have done the least to help students reach their academic potential. Our series - "Why Not the Best?" (http://www.oregonlive.com/special/oregonian/education) drew hundreds of calls and e-mails from outraged readers.
The Oregonian used SPSS to run regression analyses on student test scores, using family background statistics to "level the playing field" among schools and see how each local school performs, given the students who come through their doors.
Many newspapers issue "report cards" on schools in their communities. These typically pull together existing data, including test scores, and organize in reader-friendly fashion. The problem is that, inevitably, schools with more educated and affluent parents get the top grades; schools with uneducated and poor parents the worst.
A few newspapers go beyond that by conducting regression analyses. Those efforts all are grounded in the same reality: A school's average test score tells you more about how wealthy and well-educated the parents are than how effective the school is, so it's essential to systematically discount the effects of family background to measure school performance.
The Oregonian added some new twists to its particular analysis, so that we can stake a real claim not to have let our suburban schools off the hook. We focused not on finding schools in impoverished neighborhoods that do well, a story that local educators were eager for us to tell. Instead, we took a hard look at schools in the most privileged neighborhoods and told readers about the ones that were coasting or failing. And we anchored our findings to national data, from the SAT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, to provide a data-grounded reality check for parents who were hearing a relentless drumbeat of boosterism about Oregon schools being "world-class."
SPSS is easy to use, and we relied on NICAR's Advanced Bootcamp on Statistics to get the refresher we needed in how to use it right.