I Wish The People Trying To Build A Better World Would Stop Endlessly Obsessing Over Linguistic Minutiae
There’s almost no chance this stuff matters much, overhyped studies notwithstanding
It’s an exciting tweet:
The link points to a working paper (that is, not yet peer-reviewed) by David M. Quinn and Tara-Marie Desruisseaux of the University of Southern California, published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Quinn and Desruisseaux used an online sample of teachers to generate their result. “We randomly assigned teachers to one of two versions of a survey item, asking some to rate how much of a priority they felt it was to ‘close the (Black/White) achievement gap,’ and others to rate the conceptually synonymous ‘ending (Black/White) inequality in educational outcomes.’”
The respondents answered the following questions. Below is how it looked with the “achievement gap” language, but others were asked to answer the same questions regarding “inequality in educational outcomes.”
My first observation is that for this study to tell us anything, it’s really, really important for these actually to be near-synonymous terms, and I’m not sure they are.
