Problems in Pseudo-Scientific Thinking: The Parntership of Wrong

Prologue

 In my previous blog post, I talked about some of the difficulties our school has with making rational decisions. Here I am talking about a large part of the problem: Partnership for Change. For the uninitiated, PFC is an organization set up by the Burlington and Winooski  school districts with the goals to: "shape a hopeful and prosperous future for our two communities, and to ensure that all young people in Winooski and Burlington have the knowledge, skills, and habits they need to thrive."

Anecdotes Do Not Make Science

Partnership For Change has a fairly active blog (partnershipvt.org/blog/) with
11 pages of posts on a variety of topics. One thing that is notably absent, however, is anything approaching data. There is page after page of anecdotes and discussion, but not one graph nor piece of data about effect of the organization's over $800,000 annual budget. There is one study by the partnership about the best ways to communicate information to parents, and about personalized learning plans. (70% of parents believe Jupiter-grades is very important, half thing PLP's are a good idea, guess which we get rid of and which we add). For a group who's goal is to ensure that all young people in the districts are doing well, it is rather shocking to see that none of the PFC's projects have had any followup on them to see if they work.

Scientific Language Does Not Make Science

Here we will play a game called Identify what PFC has said, and what the Educational Jargon Generator has said. (The educational jargon generator is a website that combines random technobabble here http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html)

1. Leverage assessment-driven styles for our 21st Century learners.
2. Be directly impacted by enhanced learning opportunities due to a robust system of teacher learning and development.
3. Learn in an inter-disciplinary, collaborative classroom environment.
4. Streamline proactive methodologies to close the achievement gap.
5. Regularly communicate and interact to promote understanding so adults are supported as partners in student’s learning.
6. Discern technology-enhanced presentations across content areas.

Highlight the blacked out text to see which were real.
Partnership for Change has said 2 3 and 5
(I am curious how many people can get)
The underlying problem is that the Partnership for Change uses a lot of complicated terminology to justify what are often ideas that have either very mixed evidence behind them, or none whatsoever.