Adeo Interruptum

Elizabeth's trek to the Big City netted me a fresh new copy of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which has paused the project I mentioned at the end of this post to re-visit The Hades factor to determine if my memory of it being leaps and bounds better than the TV movie that bore the same name.

[Eliel can so far report that his recollection is correct. The book is better, and (as usually happens when doing a second reading of a text) he has proof. We can expect more on that subject from him later --Ed.]

Freakanomics is a great read. "Freaky" economist Steven D. Levitt, having apparently proven his economic chops early on, is now in the enviable position of being able to apply the tools of economic analysis to social questions where many fear to tread.

So far, his focus seems to be on (as is most of economics, when you think about it) what motivates humans to take the actions they do. The introduction provides brief overviews of the specifics covered in the book. It meanders around, providing anecdotal stories that show the way that looking at the world through an economists eyes can be revealing of what factors really effect change in society. But I'll touch more on that in another post.

I'd like to draw attention to the very first chapter where he explores a study that determined what effect the introduction of standardized testing (of the sort that affects a school's standing in it's district, in the model of the "No Child Left Behind" Act) had on teachers and students in a Chicago school district. The conclusion: a good number of bad teachers will cheat to improve their students scores. As Levitt explains, the punitive nature of the testing, and the unsupervised application of them, provides motive and opportunity, respectively, to those teachers whose students are generally underperforming for their grade level. Worse yet is that what to them might seem like a petty "crime" in fact has devastating consequences for their students:

There are two noteworthy points to be made about the children in classroom A [the cheating teacher's students--Ed], tangential to the cheating itself. The first is that they are obviously in terrible academic shape, which makes them the very children whom high-stakes testing is promoted as helping the most. The second point is that these students would be in for a terrible shock once they reached the seventh grade. All they knew was that they had been successfully promoted due to their test scores. (No child left behind, indeed.) They weren't the ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade--and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.

It's great to see this type of analysis done on this issue. The rhetoric for and against the Act has been pretty harsh. This study shows the problems inherent in this type of evaluation system, and it's not too hard to imagine a solution: All it would take would be the creation of a professional circuit of exam administrators to handle the test-giving. But I find myself asking: who's going to take the responsibility now to address these types of abuses?

Of course, in a few years, someone like Mr. Levitt would be able to tell us exactly what types of incentives it would take to bribe one of these professional proctors, but at least the classroom could be a place of learning again for a short time instead of test-rigging.