Freakonomics Radio - 45. Those Cheating Teachers!

Episode Date: October 18, 2011

High-stakes testing has produced some rotten apples. But they can be caught.

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. It's time once again for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio. Every couple of weeks 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, Stephen Leavitt from the University of Chicago. Guys, welcome to the program. Hey, Kai, how are you? Good to be here. Okay, 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 Leavitt, in Chicago, like eight or ten years ago, you actually caught some teacher cheating.

So the first question is, based on your experience, can we say how many teachers cheat? Looking at the data, our estimate at the time, we thought that 5% of all the elementary school classrooms in Chicago showed evidence that the teachers had cheated on behalf of their students on these exams. Do we know why teachers cheat, 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. Leavitt, 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 current policy? I mean, if you cheat, you get fired? Well, I think there are two things you can do if you don't like cheating. One is what Arne did ex post, 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 teachers. The other option that's available to policymakers if they really don't like cheating is just to 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. What 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. 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? Well, 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. 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 hire lots and lots of census takers. You know, we could hire some exam proctors at a much, much lower cost. And if it would help get the schools in the shape that we want them to be in, it'd be money well spent.

Not to end on a downer, but this is really the classic Sisyphean task, right? I mean, people are always going to cheat and you're always going to be behind in ingenuity and ways to combat it, right? I don't think so. I think this is one problem. Many problems are difficult. This problem 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. And so I think it's a failure of incentives, not that we don't know how to fight this. You actually tried to start a company offering your catching cheating teacher skills to school districts around the country. Nobody was interested.

I mean, who wants to buy our party? One person came forward. In East St. Louis, they just reconstituted the entire district. And one of the guys who was 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 district. Even the overseeing board could not get the school district.

They wouldn't give us the data. So of all the business ideas I ever had, that, I think, ranks at the very bottom in terms of profitable and likely success. Freakonomics.com is the website. Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner, guys, thank you so much. Talk to you soon, guys.