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Freakonomics: Tackling the problem of cheating teachers
A teacher speaks to her class in Miami, Fla.
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Kai Ryssdal: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It's that moment every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name, joined this week by the other guy, the other co-author, Steven Levitt from the University of Chicago. Guys, welcome to the program.
Stephen Dubner: Hey Kai, how are you?
Steven Levitt: Good to be here.
Ryssdal: OK, so the topic du jour is cheating, specifically teacher cheating. There have been some big scandals lately in Atlanta and I think in Washington, D.C. And Levitt, in Chicago, like eight or 10 years ago, you actually caught some teacher cheating. So the first question is, based on your experience, can we say how many teachers cheat?
Levitt: Looking at the data, our estimate at the time, we thought that 5 percent of all the elementary school classrooms in Chicago showed evidence that the teachers had cheated on behalf of their students on these exams.
Ryssdal: Do we know why teachers cheat, Dubner?
Dubner: Incentives, right? So these days we've just seen the No Child Left Behind law be scaled back quite a bit. What's happened is states have been given more latitude for how they're going to administer tests. But the fact is if you're a teacher and all of a sudden there's a new incentive in place for you to not do poorly in your class, then teachers all of a sudden have the kind of incentive that students used to have. And so there are some teachers -- now granted, it's a very, very small portion of them -- who will cheat on behalf of the student. In this case, literally erasing incorrect answers and filling in the correct ones -- not necessarily to help the kids, but to help themselves not look like they're bad performers.
Ryssdal: Levitt, getting back to Chicago in 2002 and this scandal that you caught. The then guy running the Chicago school system, Arne Duncan, who's now the U.S. secretary of education, fired a whole bunch of teachers. Is that still currently policy, if you cheat you get fired?
Levitt: I think there are two things you can do if you don't like cheating. One is what Arne did expose, which is he actually let us really ferret out who the cheaters were and they went to the trouble to hold the hearings and to fire a bunch of tires. The other option that's available to policymakers if they really don't like cheating is just make it harder to cheat. People don't cheat much on the LSAT or the SAT because the companies that provide those tests spend a lot of money and they make it hard to cheat. With school districts now, I think have an ambivalence towards cheating because they really do want higher test scores and so they often carry out these tests in ways that it's not hard at all for teachers to cheat. In fact, maybe even subtly encouraged.
Ryssdal: But it's that whole spend-a-lot-of-money thing because public schools, as we know, in good parts of this country are out of money. How do you do it in a way that's cost effective?
Levitt: I think you can even do it without spending money. So for instance, one thing I proposed to Chicago at the time was that instead of having the teachers in a school administer the testing themselves, you would just have the teachers go to a different school that day and have other teachers come in and administer the test.
Dubner: Also, with as much money as the Department of Education spends now, Kai, and as high as unemployment is, it's not hard to imagine that you could enact a scenario where you could offer a part-time job. You know, we higher lots and lots of census takers, we could higher some exam proctors at a much, much lower cost and if it would help get the schools in the shape we want them to be in, it would be money well spent.
Ryssdal: Not to end on a downer, but this is really the classic Sisyphean task. Right? People are always going to cheat and you're always going to be behind in ingenuity and ways to combat it. Right?
Levitt: I don't think so. I think this one problem. Many problems are difficult, this one is easy. The real problem here is that the people who would have to make those choices and would have to spend that money, they actually don't want cheating to go away that badly. So I think it's a failure of incentives, not that we don't know how to fight this. So...
Dubner: Levitt, you actually tried to start a company offering your catching-cheating-teacher skills to school districts around the country.
Ryssdal: Is that right? Do tell. How did that go?
Levitt: Nobody was interested. I mean, who wants to buy our product? One person came forward. In East St. Louis, they had just reconstituted the entire district. And one of the guys on the board said, 'We'd really like you to come and we think there might have been cheating. Could you look at the data?' And they couldn't get the school, even the overseeing board, could not get the school district, they wouldn't give us the data. So of all the business ideas I've ever had, that I think ranks at the very bottom in terms of profitability and likely success.
Ryssdal: Freakonomics.com is the website. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, guys thank you so much.
Levitt: Thank you, Kai.
Dubner: Talk to you soon, Kai.
I couldn't find the episode I was looking for, but I think it was Wednesday 10/17; Prof Dubner was talking about the Laffer curve. He seemed to accept the notion that if taxes go up (specifically, if tax rates go up) people won't work as hard because they get to keep less money for each additional hour's work. That might make sense for people who are paid by the piece, but most people get paid by the hour or by the month and they work 40 hours per week whether the tax rate is high or low. And for people who live on capital gains, or carried interest, I don't see that the amount they earn bears any relation to how hard they work. So why is this notion widely accepted? It sounds to me like Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged types who are threatening to take their initiative and go home if we try to get them to pay their fair share of taxes. Seriously, can anyone explain this to me?
Instead of addressing changing incentives, as Levitt and Dubner's core thesis dictates that incentives explain everything (which in itself is a truism that is not true), they jump to "make cheating harder." What?!
I argue our education system is now actually suffering from the application of economic theory to it: education yields results, we measure results, if we get them, we are happy, damn the consequences, and make sure that Ross Perot gets paid for giving us the tests to do it. What a regurgitative nightmare American education has become...
Well, isn't it special to find out those brilliant Freakonomics guys are jumping on the popular bandwagon of teacher-bashing? Teachers are in the untenable position of bearing both the responsibility for students' mastery of subject matter and blame for their inability to inspire the same students to perform to an arbitrary standard on a (typically) poorly designed test instrument having no perceived relevance to the Immediate circumstances of the students' life. The teachers are acutely aware that the students' performance may well decide whether the teacher has a job next year. Motivation to cheat on a test? Ya think? It would be a lot more useful if Leavitt and Dubner would turn their talents to a topic like how to structure a standardized test situation in a way that would create a desire to perform well on the test. I give them a failing grade on this report.
I was shocked when Steven said "People don't cheat much on the LSAT or the SAT because the companies that provide those tests spend a lot of money and they make it hard to cheat. " did he not hear the All Things Considered story on 10/17 about the SAT cheating ring? http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141434073/n-y-prosecutors-investigate-sat-...
Maybe the problem is the tests and not so much the cheating. Campbell's Law predicts cheating on high stakes testing, and the truth is that testing is counterproductive, and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. We would all be better off studying the Norwegian schools that eschew testing entirely.
I feel that this story entirely missed the important problem. Teachers cheating on standardized testing is not the problem, it is not even A problem (But I will return to that later), the problem at hand is the tests themselves. The problem is the school system which has become so entrenched in standardized testing and standardization that it is hard, as a student, to take any part of an education seriously, or even to obtain an education. Standardized testing is dehumanizing children, and giving incentives to schools to discourage creativity, divergent thinking, and countless forms of genius which are not recognized by the standardized test. Artists, and athletes, and musicians, and brilliant authors, and intuitive psychoanalysts, and thousands and thousands of brilliant minds are not recognized by the ubiquitous test, and as a result, the vast majority of children are being failed by the school system. I would argue that teachers Should cheat on standardized testing, nothing better could happen in the system than a little disobedience! The system will fall if it is opposed unilaterally, as all systems do, and lets face it, the system is broken.
This article talked about catching the cheating teachers, I would propose to actually start teaching people again. We must break free from the school of thought in which we are entrenched, this thought which says that economy is paramount, that standardization is preferable, that learning can be quantified by a test, and graded by the indifferent bureaucratic test-grading masses of whom we see and hear so little. We must escape this rut, these doldrums, and move forward into an age of humanity. What is a school that suppresses innovation? What is the society that supports this school, and asks it to suppress harder? I don't know about you, but today's school system seems rather Orwellian to me... "Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is Power, War is Peace." (If you don't recognize those words, perhaps you should pick up a book every now and then). Among those party slogans, one is most appropriate to our nation of misinformation "Ignorance is power..."
Ignorance is power, not in the hands of the people, but the government (who sanctions, funds, and often executes these tests).
While Dubner and Leavitt's work on detection of cheating is great, was something lost on the editing room floor? The entire question of incentives, which they suggested was critical and needed to be addressed, was avoided in this story. Ariely's work is more to the point about how incentives can get perverted when you attach too much import to them and it would be interesting to look at his work and commentary.
In general, the more emphasis we put on judging teachers on their student's test scores, the more that will matter to teachers, and this is sure to bring unintended consequences. I was reminded of this in a recent op-ed about medical billing and how the emphasis on procedures over consultations has affected the practice of medicine. We're going to end up with a system that emphasizes prepping kids for tests, instead of the actual teaching of transferable skills.
