| No Images? Click here   Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's education secretary and perhaps the most widely hated member of his cabinet, loves voucher schools — many of which are run by evangelical Christian churches. These private schools are subsidized with taxpayer dollars, but they can teach anything they want. So HuffPost's Rebecca Klein set out to find out what, exactly, they're teaching. She found out they teach a lot of lies. We asked her about the story.How did this story come about? Whose idea was it? How did it take shape? When did you decide it needed to be a data project?I spoke to someone a few months ago who mentioned that she thought curriculums with questionable or incorrect content were popular in private schools that participate in voucher programs. I thought I would do a short article about a specific school that uses them. Then, when I started talking about the story to my editor, Sam, she had a lot of questions. She wanted to know how often these textbooks were used. We learned that no one was keeping track, and decided to build our own database. We thought it would take a few weeks — it ended up taking much, much longer.What was the hardest thing about reporting, writing or editing this piece?The hardest part was building the database! States, I learned, are very haphazard in the information they collect about their own voucher programs. Some did not even have a list of schools participating in their state. Before I could even get to tracking schools' textbooks, I had to go on a wild goose chase to create a list of schools.What did you expect to find? What surprised you?It surprised me how little states seemed to know about what was going on in the classrooms that taxpayers helped support. There is a real lack of accountability over what is taught.Did you learn anything that might be useful to other writers or reporters?We made our database public so that reporters (and readers) can use it to inform their own stories. You can learn a lot about a school from what they teach.What do you think readers should take away from this story?There is an assumption that if a child goes to private school, then they are automatically going to a good school. That is certainly not the case. Public schools are held to a certain level of standards. In many cases, private schools can do whatever they want.Want to know more? Click the big green button!
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