"Almost 240 shootings took place at U.S. schools during the 2015-16 year, according to figures published in April by the Department of Education. Think about that number: 240. That's tens of thousands of American children exposed to mortal danger.
"Now think about this number: 11. Because when NPR tried to confirm the incidents reported by the government, that's how many it could verify. And while some of the entries in the Education Department's study could neither be verified nor disproved, NPR's report found that in two-thirds of the cases, the school districts contacted by the news organization said that no shootings had occurred.
"How can NPR and the Education Department be getting such clashing results?
"NPR's reporting suggests that much of the problem is that school districts simply filled out the forms incorrectly. In Cleveland, for example, whoever was in charge of compiling the data seems to have put the answer to the previous question - which asked about possession of a knife or firearm - into the space designated for the discharge of a firearm on school grounds.
"These kinds of data errors inevitably creep into any large survey, as anyone who has ever made a slight mistake on a tax form can attest. And in most contexts, such errors probably don't matter much; they're just a bit of statistical noise in a broadly sound dataset.
"But they become a big problem when the phenomenon being studied is relatively rare."
-- Megan McArdle
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