In my run-down of school data sources, how coud I overlook Standard & Poor's site SchoolMatters?

This is probably the best of the lot, with a clean, easy to use design and well organized information. best of all, they allow you to build your own reports, compare schools, look at benchmaring data, map, collect a list of favorites and much more.

Currently there are several different ways to get information about schools in the Kansas City Area.

One of the best is GreatSchools.net a national website that is quite comprehensive and has nice graphical representations of school data, not just pure numbers. The site integrates mapping capabilities to/from various schools and has a review and ratings system which is an excellent feature. Really the biggest complaint I have is the reliance on advertising, (flash banners and some pop ups) which makes the experience pretty distracting. This seems to be a project funded largely by grants--perhaps the use of advertising creates more financial stability for the project, but it is easily mistaken as a for-profit initiative because of the commercial look and feel of the site.

Government Sources: No matter where you get school data, all the data comes from the state government. In this area you have the Public school reports from the Kansas State Department of Education and the Missouri State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Like many government resources, they do a great job of being comprehensive but are difficult sites to navigate. Data is presented in text or html tables that don't illustrate as effectively as charts or well-formatted tables. Both sites rely on some confusing terminology and acronyms that are not adequately explained. For instance check out this page to see how obfuscating this info can be.

Interestingly, school district data is almost never found on the district websites themselves.

Over the last year we have struggled with how to present school data on the KCResearch site. Basically we don't want to reproduce someone else's work if we can't do it better. The first iteration of our attempt is available on two pages one for Missouri-side school districts and another for Kansas-side districts. We use a map as a navigation tool which gets users to that government-supplied information. So essentially, we are providing an easier way to access the same documents.

However, I think the potential for providing access to school information is huge and there is a lot of work to be done. KCResearch needs to provide access at the individual school level, not just the district level. We also need to manipulate the data provided by Kansas and Missouri to present information in better ways. The same old tables aren't the best long term solution. Most importantly, we need an approach that treats Kansas City as a region--two states, multiple counties, multiple cities.

The Institute for Policy and Social Research at KU publishes an online, scholarly journal twice a year called Kansas Policy Review. You may know the organization from its previous name, Policy Research Institute. Anyhow KPR is an excellent publication that presents short, high quality research essays about public policy topics with a particular focus on Kansas. The articles are generally written by professors and scholars working in the region. KPR is the latest incarnation of a journal that has been around for many years under the name 'Kansas Business Review' and later 'Kansas Business and Economic Review.'

The most recent issue (volume 27, no.1) just became available yesterday on their website, and we also provide access to all issues via KCResearch. The contents of the current issue are:

"Baby Boomers and Immigrants on the Range: Population Trends in Kansas" by László J. Kulcsár

"The State of Innovation in Kansas" by Joshua L. Rosenbloom

"Sizing up Kansas Public Finance" by Glenn W. Fisher, H. Edward Flentje, W. Bartley Hildreth, and John D. Wong

"City-County Consolidation: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape": by Suzanne M. Leland

Beyond KPR, the Institute (or IPSR as it is known) published a host of important statistics, studies and reports on their website. All applicable documents that we could locate are included in KCResearch and I encourage eveyone to check them out.

According to a new study by JD Power & Associates, Kansas City International Airport ranks number one among travelers in the Mid-Size airport category. Rankings are based on categories such as baggage claim, the efficiency of security checks, and availability of food and retail services.

See the ratings.

Read the press release.

I'm not going to try to give a definitive answer to this question, other than to say "it depends." Unlike many other cities, the KC city limits touch 4 counties: Jackson, Clay, Platte and Cass. So already, there is overlap. On the Kansas side, you have Wyandotte and Johnson. Beyond that, how far do you go?

MARC defines the metro region as 9 counties -- they add Miami, Leavenworth and Ray counties to the mix.  The Kansas City Area Development Council (The ThinkKC folks) say it's 18, which is much bigger, but their model is based on economic relationships between places. We say it's 18 too, but only as a means of providing scope for what we collect. We have to stop somewhere, but we don't want to miss out on all that great stuff about Lawrence and Topeka. The official Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is 15 counties now. This is the chunk used for the collection of census data among other things. It includes Bates, Franklin and Linn counties which are omitted from our definition, but they leave out Shawnee, Douglas, Atchison, Buchanan and Johnson (MO) counties.

All this presents a challenge for us, because people who conduct research all define the Kansas city metro differently. It can be hard to compare apples to apples. We have done our best to categorize documents so that you can tell what places are covered. Nonetheless many documents in KCResearch include the seemingly fuzzy "Kansas City Metropolitan Area" term. This basically means that the item discusses a region as a whole that is greater than five counties or so, with little or no ability to parse out data for individual counties. Make sense? With everyone so committed to their particular definitions, KCResearch is remaining gloriously ambiguous.

KCResearch got a nice shout-out today from Tony's Kansas City. Like many people, I read Tony's blog every day because he knows what's going on in this town. In fact we read dozens of blogs each morning because it is a great way to find out about new research for the database, and also provides a sense of how people are reacting to developments in this region.

Anyhow, it's nice to know that folks see value in the work that we do here at KCPL, and I hope that we can continue to improve the resource to attract new users. It's great that the local blogging community is so strong in KC, I hope this humble site will become a meaningful addition to the great local conversation that happens in the blogosphere every day.

Yesterday the City of KCMO announced that it was seeking proposals to help develop a formal economic development policy. The city has been working on this issue for several months, and have posted a draft report of their findings to their site, which is also available in KCResearch. Basically, the City has no clearly defined policy to guide it in making decisions relating to tax breaks, in service of economic development. They plan to publish a revised draft of this report on Friday. Thanks to the City for allowing us to host this document.

Interestingly, the report observes that FOCUS Kansas City, now about 10 years old, "no longer carries any weight in the City or with its partners." When this new plan is released, i wouldn't be surprised to see the FOCUS reports removed from the KCMO website. But even as the FOCUS project loses visibility we continue to host the publications in KCResearch. In fact, this is precisely why our database exists, to provide an ongoing access point for research documents like these, because electronic files posted on a website are tenuous things indeed. 

In the future, when it is harder to get access to documents that are a mere 10 or 12 years old, it will be possible to use KCResearch to compare strategies like KCMO's economic development initiatives over time.

Unlike many academic subscription databases, KCResearch includes many kinds of research documents, most of which have not been formally approved by a panel of experts in various fields. However, this project seeks to cover slightly different ground. As a result we have an intentionally broad definition of "good research" for the collection. There are several reasons for this:

• We want to include research outside the regulated realm of academia,
  such as non-profit reports, government statistics and strategic plans.
• We cover a wide variety of disciplines. We cannot easily assemble an editorial board for each area.
• Peer-reviewed research is already collected and disseminated by scholarly journals.
• We want to appeal to a wider audience than experts.
• Many of the organizations in KCResearch are oriented to practice, and do not have peer-reviewed avenues of publication, despite conforming to accepted standards of quality.

That being said, we welcome submissions of high-quality scholarly research to the database! And we know that scholars will find value in our collections. For this reason, we identify the peer-review status of each document in the database. As mentioned, the peer-review is not conducted by our staff,, but when a document has undergone a similar process prior to submission, we will point that out in the record. Our definition of peer-review in KCResearch incorporates the following:

• Conference papers and presentations.
• Papers that also appear in peer-reviewed journals.
• Pre-prints of papers that were later published in peer-reviewed journals.
• Theses and dissertations

Here is a list of peer-reviewed documents in KCResearch as of today.