ASA Connect

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is holding a public briefing on December 8, 2017, titled "The School to Prison Pipeline: The Intersection of Students of Color with Disabilities."   My written statement, prepared in connection with a short oral presentation I will be giving on one of the panels, may be found on the Measurement Letters page of jpscanlan.com.  The statement principally addresses the issue treated in my December 2012 Amstat New column "Misunderstanding of Statistics Leads to Misguided Law Enforcement Policies" regarding the government's mistaken belief that generally reducing adverse public school discipline (or other) outcomes tends to reduce, rather than increase, relative racial and other demographic differences in rates of experiencing the outcomes.  This is also the issue that, by letters of October 8, 2015 and July 25, 2016 (available on the same webpage), I urged ASA to explain to arms of the U.S. government.  The statement also briefly addresses larger issues regarding the ways measures tend to be affected by the prevalence of an outcome and my urging the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice to halt funding of research into demographic differences that fails to consider such issues.  Either at the briefing or in a formal letter I will be urging the Commission to study the ways analyses of demographic and other differences in outcome rates have been undermined as a result of the failure to recognize patterns by which measures of differences between outcome rates tend to be affected by the prevalence of an outcome.  This is the same sort of action I sought from ASA in the 2015 letter, as well as from the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, Population Association of America, and various other entities in the communications collected on the Measurement Letters page.