EBD Blog

Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) has a 5-year plan to reduce child maltreatment, according to the Empire Journal (location unknown). Among the myriad goals, most of which aim at extra-school issues, is this one related to education: “Reduction of out of school suspensions for children with Severe Emotional Disturbance from 35.11 to 34.41 percent.”

Anyone else see this as underwhelming? Is reducing suspensions by 6-tenths of a percent an admirable goal? Maybe it’s a typo. Thinking that might be the case, I went to the actual document. It’s not a typo. There are objectives for reducing in-school suspensions (by 00.35%) and out-of-school suspensions (by 00.6%).

Not only that, but check out the graph from the report; note my red arrow pointing at the origin in the graph and just imagine what it would look like if the origin was 00%. Why, what looks like a big difference wouldn’t be particularly obvious, I’d hazzard a guess. In a book called How to Lie with Statistics I think this ploy is illustrated.

Now, there are several other quite laudable goals and objectives in that report, but this doesn’t inspire me. See for yourself and correct me if I’m mistaken.

Link to the story. Link to the Florida DCF report (3.6 MBs).