MONSTER HYPE

How Few Isolated Tragedies-And Their Supposed Causes-Were Turned Into A National “Epidemic”

How Few Isolated Tragedies-And Their Supposed Causes-Were Turned Into A National “Epidemic”

Contemporary discussions about social issues, especially within education, almost always involve statistics. Numbers have become an essential element in policy rhetoric, a form of evidence needed to persuade others. Statistics let us claim that we can measure the size of our problems and the effectiveness of our solutions. Yet even as we rely on numbers, we are bedeviled by innumeracy, the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy. Too often, we fail to think critically about the statistics we encounter, to ...