Matt Stiles
covered government and politics for the Tribune, with a focus on data journalism, from 2009 to 2011. He oversaw and developed the Tribune’s library of web applications and interactive graphics. Previously, he was a government reporter at the Houston Chronicle. While there, he won the newspaper’s Jesse Award for service journalism and beat reporting and was its reporter of the year in 2007. Before joining the Chronicle, Stiles worked as a reporter for nearly four years at The Dallas Morning News.
That’s right — they’re not from Texas. Newly licensed physicians enlisting to treat the state’s Medicaid and Medicare patients are more likely to have been trained at international medical schools, according to a review of state medical licensing data. Full Story
Of the roughly 1,500 doctors who have received fast-tracked licenses in the last three years for agreeing to treat Medicaid and Medicare patients, about 40 percent were trained at international medical schools, while just a quarter were trained at Texas medical schools. The Texas Medical Board fast-tracked more licenses for doctors trained in Pakistan — halfway around the globe — than it did for doctors educated in neighboring Louisiana or Oklahoma. Scroll over our interactive world map to see where these internationally-trained doctors got their medical education. Full Story
Susan Combs' new texastransparency.org includes an Open Data Center, where anyone can download dozens of raw data sets, much like the federal government's data.gov. Full Story
Aides to Gov. Rick Perry's re-election campaign have accused his Democratic challenger, Bill White, the former mayor of Houston, of running a “sanctuary city," where officers don't inquire about immigration status during routine patrols and investigations. But Houston's policy is remarkably similar to that of Texas DPS under Perry. If Houston is a sanctuary city, why isn't Texas a sanctuary state? Full Story
President Obama and the U.S. Senate haven't yet installed U.S. Attorneys in any of Texas' four federal court districts. As our national map shows, more than half of the country is in the same situation. Full Story
Our latest interactive database has records on each of the more than 160,000 inmates in Texas prisons, including their names, crimes, hometowns, height, weight and gender, the counties in which they were convicted and their sentencing dates. Explore them all. Full Story
We've built a searchable database of public school rankings based on data collected by the Houston-based nonprofit Children At Risk. In contrast to the Texas Education Agency's "ratings," which rely almost entirely on the percentage of students passing the TAKS test, the rankings blend 12 different measures for elementary schools, 10 for middle schools and 14 for high schools — including TAKS results, ACT and SAT scores, AP exams, attendance rates, graduation rates and the percentage of economically disadvantaged students on every campus. How does your school stack up? Full Story