Using Science as a Whore - How to Increase School Resources

This CBC article showed up on my Google News Search. Toronto District School board published a study showing that its students are worried about the future and losing sleep over it.

Toronto public high school students are more worried about their future than their relationships or family matters
 

...More worried about the future than they are about their relationships and families? I'm not sure if I should be more alarmed about the ranking of the level of worry on these subjects or whether they are worried about them at all.

This was the first time the board surveyed its students on mental health issues.
"What our research showed us is that there's certainly a gap in the area of mental health and we need to focus more of our resources in the area of mental health," Schwartz-Maltz told the Canadian Press.
"These surveys drive programming in our schools, they give us a snapshot of the way our kids are feeling and they drive what we do."

Read: We need more resources to fund more staff to provide more programs to "help" young people.

The TDSB is trying to inflate its importance, just like every single government body. When a study like this is performed, the actual results are at the same time irrelevant and predetermined.

The questions are tilted to favour the desired outcome - 'Are YOU concerned about YOUR future?' As far as I'm concerned, the more youth that answer, yes, to that question the better. Frankly, kids need to be concerned and, in this economy, you'd be nuts not to be concerned unless you're filthy rich. It's a perfect example of a leading question. When you hear the question, it immediately puts worry into your mind and you start to ask questions about your future. The wacky thing is, the psychologists who phrase the question know this perfectly well. They know what confirmation bias is. They study, negativity bias and framing affect in school - many probably wrote final papers on the subjects. They understand that double-blind studies should be used to ensure their own biases don't affect the science. I'm tempted to blame this on the Dunning-Kruger affect, but, it seems more likely that they use their vast knowledge of the human psyche to ensure the results match their desired outcome.

The numbers, inflated as they are, make no difference to the study's conclusion. Someone thought it would be a good idea to put more psychologists, social workers and other programs in school, or some such measure. If there isn't a problem, they need to find one and make sure that it is the school board's problem to fix. So, they performed a study on their students to support this desire. How many students need to be concerned about their future to justify spending X million dollars on better mental health support? One is not related to the other, so the whole exercise is meaningless.

The sad part is, they're talking about taking dollars that could be spent on music, sports, arts and other educational programs so that schools can do more about mental health issues. Why not have a school system focused on school issues, and health departments focus on health issues?

Once again, science whores are trotted out to the public to give the illusion that we're thinking about important issues, when we're really trying to increase funding from taxes to hire more social workers. The full colourfully graphed report is here.