Barton’s SAT-prayer correlation ignores rising test-taker diversity.

Evidence

Of course, Barton could just as well have blamed the decline of public education on the Beach Boys, who also happened to make it big in 1962. In order to pin the blame for declining SAT scores on the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions, Barton also has to overlook the massive changes in American education at the time. Many of them involved the expansion of the school systems to include previously excluded and disadvantaged groups of people, which predictably resulted in a significant increase in the number of test-takers and a decrease in average scores. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 518

Categorization

• SEED: The Beach Boys line is a great rhetorical model for debunking spurious correlations — essay on why causal cherry-picking succeeds despite obvious confounds.