I mean, I’m sure we’d all like to imagine that the principal is heroically concealing his source and taking the fall to protect some poor little girl who spoke out about the pact from persecution by her peers or something…. but more likely he was covering his ass and speculating as an explanation for a skyrocketing statistic.

Of course, the only alternate explanation I have for their little baby-boom is the Hollywood fetishization of the new batch of mega-star moms.

Did it happen? Beats me. It sounds like something teenagers would do, but nobody has presented any evidence of it.

The school principle, denies ever having claimed that there was a pact. Thus in addition to having no evidence to support the allegation, there is no allegation.

(He does admit to claiming that the girls became pregnant deliberately (for which he also has no evidence). It’s possible that he said “pact”, but it’s just as plausible that the reporter made that bit up.)

Teenagers are morons. The described pact was moronic behavior. It is therefore consistent to a first-order approximation of what we’d expect from teenagers.

Um, no. Stop lumping all the millions of people between the age of 13 and 19, across racial, gender, socioeconomic and national lines, and across the entire history of time, together just because they’re sort of the same age, for one. Also, I have no idea how old you are, but I’m going to guess you’re older than me, because at age twenty I have a pretty good memory of my teenage years. Some teenagers do moronic things, but that doesn’t make them morons. There are places in the world even now where people are expected to get married and start having children during their teen years. Most Western teenagers have jobs, either part-time or full-time. They drive, some more recklessly than others, but they’re legally allowed to do so. In many places, they’re expected to pick a college, pick a major, pick a life, if they’re from a wealthy-enough background. They’re allowed to join the military. They’re allowed to vote. They’re allowed to smoke, and in most countries, they’re allowed to drink. And yes, they have sex. Some screw up, others don’t.

But insisting that they’re all, every single one, morons? Just shows that you have a very, very bad memory, and that condescending is easier for you to do than understanding is.

While I agree that teens do a lot of stupid shit–including getting pregnant, BTW, which is generally a bad idea for a teen–it doesn’t seem that this particular accusation was accurate. Which MATTERS, you guys, doesn’t it? Robert, RonF: since when did the burden of proof flip around here?

Statistical intuition that it’s significant.

Someone else might bother to crunch the numbers and see if the intuition is on the right track; I don’t care enough. I won’t be shocked to find that it isn’t, or that it is.

Mind you, I also find it perfectly believable that the Gloucester principal made the whole thing up. Mendacity among public school officials is probably as common as teenage rank stupidity. I don’t offer the above as evidence that it did happen as the principal held, just as a rational basis for not disbelieving reports of the existence of such a pact among a few teenage girls out of hand.

Not to mention that Gloucester’s pregnancy rate in 2005 was roughly what it was in 2007, suggesting 2006 — the year this big jump is based on — might have been the outlier.

Something seems to have triggered a statistically very unusual event [...] What’s your superior alternative explanation for a quadrupling of the pregnancy rate in one particular school?

Why do you think it needs explanation?

There are around 15,000 high schools in the USA. Furthermore, this story might have happened any time during the last 10 years, but let’s be generous and call it 5; that’s 75,000 sample points. Of those 75,000 sample points, there is one that we know of in which the pregnancy rate was four times higher than average.

For one high school, in one year, to have an uptick in its pregnancy rate is something that could happen by random chance.

Actually, I suspect this sort of random fluctuation in pregnancy rates has happened dozens of times by chance, and what’s most unusual about this one is not that it happened, but that it became national news.

Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan said Tuesday that he doesn’t have the trust, confidence or respect of the mayor and superintendent.

Nor the parents, nor the students. But why would they be a consideration, eh?

There may be condemnation to legitimately be handed out, in any cases where those teen pregnancies were done carelessly; on the other hand, some of those girls are likely old enough to know what they are doing. But even in the former case, the condemnation to be made is for poor decisions, not “sex is bad you dirty whores”.

And (as in almost all cases), I do embrace them for choosing to keep their children.

Did it happen? Beats me. It sounds like something teenagers would do, but nobody has presented any evidence of it. Two of the teenagers saying “nuh uh!” has pretty much zero value as evidence; people will deny murder as you catch them with their hands dripping blood over the corpse. Something seems to have triggered a statistically very unusual event; “some teenagers decided to be really dumb” is an explanatory theory with built-in plausibility. Plus it assigns agency to girls, which is also plausible, since girls have all kinds of agency.

But I’m not married to the theory. What’s your superior alternative explanation for a quadrupling of the pregnancy rate in one particular school?

Seriously. Is there anyone who didn’t read about this pact and immediately call bullshit?

Well, sadly, yeah. I mean, without meaning to be Captain Obvious here, I think that’s kind of the problem.