tpi database

Curious what I’ve been up to lately? Mostly working on this set of stories.
The basic idea was to find a way to see what schools get the most sought-after teachers and which one get the leftovers. So I made up something called the Teacher Preparation Index, which rates Texas schools from 1 to 10 on three factors: How many of their teachers are certified in the subjects they teach? How many are certified at all? And how many have at least two years of teaching experience (that is, they aren’t complete rookies)?
To no one’s surprise (unfortunately), the patterns I found were pretty clear: poor kids, minority kids (in particular black kids), kids who can’t speak English, and kids whose schools don’t have high test scores all get fewer prepared teachers than rich kids, white kids, etc., etc.
Here’s the main story; there’s also a caveat-style sidebar, an explanation of how I did the calculations, a Q&A for parents, a description of how most teachers become teachers, and finally the 7,145-school searchable database (previously mentioned here).
And now for the angry phone calls from principals: “Why the hell did my school get a 2.3?”