When Editor Doug Clifton called us into the conference room a year ago and said he wanted us to undertake an in-depth examination of the state of children in Northeast Ohio, we politely rolled our eyes. It was clearly one of those dreaded editor-assigned projects, an important subject but one that had been more than a bit worn out in the press. Clifton came to the table with more than simply the idea of 'children' but not too much more.
He wanted the stories to be data-driven, for us to take a report-card approach, compiling indicators that would somehow shine light on children in Cleveland and allow us to compare the condition of their lives to that of kids elsewhere. We spent the next few months searching for data. We wanted to touch on all the important areas: health, education, crime, housing. We wanted figures that could be compiled on a city-by-city basis.
And for big cities, we wanted to be able to examine what was going on in individual neighborhoods. Along the way, we found a couple of new wrinkles to this much-written story. (Much of our effort went into reporting on environmental health issues, such as identifying the 1.5 million youngsters statewide who either live next door to a toxic waste site or in poor housing). We also came up with some creative uses of Census 2000 data.
The result was a five-day series, 'Children Left Behind,' published in late July that showed how kids in Cleveland are so much worse off than those in other places in Ohio or in comparable big cities across the country. We found that Cleveland students are twice as likely to drop out of high school than those in Philadelphia or Milwaukee. A larger share of our kids lives in poverty, are lead poisoned and become teenage parents.
We also found that nearly half of Cleveland's children are living in risky housing, meaning that they are at risk for injuries, lead poisoning, and potential asthma triggers like cockroaches and rats. 'We've got Third World numbers for kids,' one community leader told us. And our data analysis showed he was right. By geocoding the addresses in five years of Ohio death records obtained from the Ohio Health Department with ArcView 3.3, we identified some city neighborhoods where infants are dying in rates that rival Guatemala, Guyana, and Romania.
This wasn't tricky, really. We used the age field in the death records to find babies less than 1 year old. Then we used ArcView's StreetMap geocoding extension to create a point map by matching the home addresses in the death records against a streets map. Later we used ArcView to attach a Census tract number to each death record, so that we could then compile infant deaths by neighborhood. Using Ohio's birth records, which show the mother's age and baby's weight and gestational age, we were able to determine that premature and low-birth weight babies born to teenage mothers cost state taxpayers and hospitals an estimated $161 million from 1997 through 2001, the latest year for which we had records.
All told, we analyzed more than a million records gathered from Ohio agencies, other states and the 2000 Census to produce our indicators and rank our cities. To make comparisons between cities fair, we used Census data to group places into eight categories based on population, median household income and the percent of residents living in urban, rural or suburban setting. Then we used a simple rank order approach to rank cities within each category.
Here's how we did it: We ranked all of the cities in each category eight different times, once for each indicator. We summed the ranks for each city, divided by eight, and re-ranked the cities on the final number. We gave each indicator equal weight.