The Power Dynamics of Data Jargon

Early in my career, I was working on a project using education data, and we were having a meeting with policymakers, school principals, and a team of researchers. When one of the principals asked a question about what assumptions were used in crafting one of the models, I was perplexed when the lead researcher launched into a long speech chock full of vague, unusual and complex jargon. Why would he do this? I knew that it wasn’t…