Testing 1..2..4 Mark Kleiman has a really good piece on the "No Child Left Behind" thing. It seems that amazingly enough, there might be some incentive for cheating on the tests on behalf of schools and it's not considered when incentivizing the schools for performanc. Wow. Who would have imagined that Congress and the President could ever be so careless. Here's an excerpt from Marks article:
The problem is measurement error, both random and non-random. [This is separate from the problem of systematic cheating due to Dukenfield's Law of Incentive Management.] The measurement error is large compared to the actual variability among schools; as a result, incentive programs that reward, e.g., "most improved" schools wind up, as Tom said, "Mostly paying for the noise rather than the signal." In addition, since the sampling error goes down as sample size rises, small schools are much more likely to be rewarded and much more likely to be punished than larger schools; the principal of a big school has so little chance of getting a prize as to largely eliminate any incentive effect. When the prize depends on doing well for every identified ethnic group, it's heterogeneous schools that suffer.
Gee, color me shocked. When our kid was in public school in VA, they basically taught nothing but what was going to be on the SOL's (Standards of Learning) tests. Learning and education were optional/not really required, test passage was. I can see that as the pressure on administrators to get results intensifies, so will institutional cheating, after all they're only human and need to put food on their families too.
