It started by reading the Oregon school report card — and grew into a Statesman Journal investigation on how poverty, race and teacher placement are linked to student achievement in the Salem-Keizer School District.

One school stood out as the only one to earn a "low" rating among all elementary schools in the state: Hallman Elementary School, a 450-student school in northeast Salem.

Mackenzie Ryan is the education reporter at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., where she writes about the second largest school district in the state. She joined IRE while investigating train derailments for the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, a project that won multiple awards. It was the first time she used a database to investigate an issue, and she was hooked.

I drive by an elementary school on my way to work every day. More than once there’s been a police cruiser idling in the school’s parking lot with lights flashing and the officer standing nearby.

Although those incidents never involved a major crime, on several occasions this year the Tulsa World has chronicled arrests at schools.

Gavin Off is the data editor at the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and a former analyst for the IRE and NICAR Database Library.

Georgia's Department of Education announced late last year that more than 240 schools had moved from failing to meet federal testing standards to passing after the retests. Those results caught the attention of Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Heather Vogell and John Perry.

This was the first year retest scores counted. The results seemed unlikely to the reporters, but they wanted to be sure.

"We kept trying to think of ways that people could explain away the numbers," Perry said.

Chris Hamby is a master’s student at the Missouri School of Journalism, where he is studying investigative reporting.

Outside hundreds of schools across the country, children are exposed to air that appears to be rife with chemicals that can exacerbate asthma or cause cancer.

The reporting that led us to that astounding conclusion began with a relatively straightforward question: What's in the air outside the nation's schools?

To find the answer, we turned to a variety of state and federal databases that pinpoint schools, detail the chemicals released from industrial facilities and estimate the potential severity of toxic air pollution across the country.

Blake Morrison is an investigative reporter and the deputy enterprise editor at USA Today. Brad Heath is a national reporter at USA Today.

The phenomenon of social promotion seemed impossible to grasp.

Teachers and parents have lamented the practice for years, watching as students were moved to the next grade level even though their scores in key subjects didn't merit their advancement. Still, no one could say how widespread the problem was. No one had found a way to quantify it.

Jack Gillum is a business reporter and database specialist at the Arizona Daily Star and also covers aviation, tech and defense news