The Education Department, asked for comment on our reporting, noted that it relies on school districts to provide accurate information in the survey responses and says it will update some of these data later this fall. But, officials added, the department has no plans to republish the existing publication….

The US department of education is a political organization just like any other.

The main concern is to keep the money flowing in, no matter how down US students fall with respect other countries. Justification for existence is paramount.

Obfuscation and ignorance is rampant judging from the article. Likely both intentional and because this is a typical inefficient/ineffective government organization.

It wasn’t always this way.

The United States was founded, formed and grew to international prominence and prestige without compulsory schooling and with virtually no government involvement in schooling. Before the advent of government-controlled schools, literacy was high (91-97% in the North, 81% in the South), private and community schools proliferated, and people cared about education and acted on their desire to learn and have their children learn.

Walter Williams has amassed a body of work on government schools.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent

LA Johnson/NPR

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?

We should know. But we don’t.

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports. Read the rest of this entry »