Playing Polling Politics

If you believed the Sun article from this morning , you would think that the School Board actually got useful information from an online poll that they conducted regarding taxes and the level of services people expect schools to provide:

Most residents support a new student fee for participation in extracurricular sports and clubs, but strongly oppose leaving 50 teaching positions empty to help balance an $871 million budget that the school board plans to approve today, according to an online survey conducted by Anne Arundel County public schools.

Of course, they don't talk too much about the poll until the next paragraph:

The results of the unscientific, informal poll, which will be released at today's Board of Education meeting, also show that 55 percent of the roughly 2,000 responses support a property tax increase that would specifically fund schools, and 50 percent back an income tax rise that would do the same.

Of course, when you place the poll on your own website, do very little to advertise the fact that there was a poll, and have no control mechanisms in place or scientific sampling procedures in place, you get a useless poll.

With barely 2,000 responses, the survey does not reflect a substantial cross-section of the more than 40,000 families who send their children to public schools, nor the district's roughly 25,000 employees, retirees and their dependents. Mosier said he could not say how many of the responses came from school district employees, but that 60 of the responses apparently came from students.

No kidding.

What's sad is that the same people who are charged with (theoretically) teaching our children about unbiased scientific discovery and the scientific method are peddling unscientific junk polling as something meaningful.