I interrupt this blog silence to celebrate some excellent news.

Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods as key parts of their probes were named today as winners of the 2007 Philip Meyer Journalism Award…

First Place: The Dallas Morning News for “Faking the Grade,” a three-day series that uncovered strong evidence of cheating on standardized tests by more than 50,000 students in Texas public and charter schools. Reporters Joshua Benton and Holly Hacker followed up on the paper’s groundbreaking 2004 investigation of cheating at the district and school level by analyzing a huge public records database of the scores and answers of hundreds of thousands of individual students taking the tests over a two-year period. The series prompted the state to announce stricter controls over test-taking conditions in Texas schools and to adopt the cheat-detection statistical methods used by the paper.

This is from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which is really the national gold standard when it comes to investigative work. Yay!

10 January 2008

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