Summer is upon us, which means an increase in street crime and ice cream consumption. However, neither one causes the other; they are both highly correlatedwith summer’s heat, which brings more people out of their homes and onto the streets, where some eat ice cream and some get mugged. Correlation is not causality.
Here are two more facts to ponder: American children take lots of standardized, machine-scored, multiple-choice tests, and they are getting fatter. Is this just another correlation, or could one be a cause of the other? Could excessive testing be at least partially responsible for the increase in child obesity?
What makes this issue complex are two other variables, an increase in poverty and the disappearance of school recess. This sad and entirely avoidable situation also illustrates the unfortunate truth of the maxim, “What we don’t care enough to measure does not matter.”
[For more on this story by JOHN MERROW, go to https://themerrowreport.com/author/themerrowreport/]
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