When is an incident involving a school-related shooting not an incident involving a school-related shooting? Don’t ask the Department of Education. As NPR reports, the federal government has no idea how many times a gun goes off in an American schools each year.
The U.S. Education Department released a study earlier this spring reporting that during the 2015-2016 school year, “240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” Then NPR decided to check their work.
As it turns out, our Education Department and our schools can’t count.
NPR decided to call each one of the schools that the Department of Education had on file as experiencing a school-related shooting. They called for months. Repeatedly. Of the nearly 240 shooting related incidents reported to the federal government, NPR was able to confirm just eleven.
Most of the “shootings” just didn’t happen. In 161 cases, NPR reports, representatives from schools or school districts said nothing happened or something had happened but it didn’t actually meet the government’s definition for a shooting. This standard isn’t super technical either. Any given educational professional with a college degree should be able to grasp the government definition, which is any discharge of a weapon at a school-sponsored event.
No one knows what caused the error. One school official noted that this was the first year the federal government surveyed school districts about shootings and wondered whether someone “pushed the wrong button.”
Pushing the wrong button once is a mistake. Pushing the wrong button 161 times is a systematic error which, not unhelpfully, illustrates an important problem.
Though well-meaning, those bureaucrats in faraway Washington, D.C. are, by definition, far away from the problem. If the Department of Education can’t even come up with an accurate accounting of the problem, why should those administrators be allowed to offer a solution?
[Also read: Three dead, including gunman, in mass shooting at Jacksonville video game tournament]
