10. See where you rank. Estimates of poverty in every school district in the U.S. are made every few years by the U.S. Census Bureau. You can find this file on the Census site, but for convenience a copy is on the training files page at http://PowerReporting.com/files/ under "poverty." You can view the list in a Web browser, but it's darn inconvenient: The districts are listed in alphabetical order, and only the raw numbers are given, not the percentage of kids in poverty. (This is typical of government Web sites.) You want the schools in rank order, with percentages, so districts are fairly compared. For this task you need a Web browser, a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel is the easiest and most ubiquitous), and 10 minutes. So the questions: (a) How do the 20 biggest school districts in the country compare in percentage of children in poverty? (b) How does your school district rank, among those in your state, in percentage of children in poverty? (c) How does your school district rank among its peers, which for this purpose we'll define as the 10 districts in your state that are closest to yours in raw population of the district?
