Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

To:  Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors, Freakonomics.

Dear Steven and Stephen,

Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s rave, having understood and loved the book’s premise—that hidden statistics we don’t want to look at tell the real story—we expected a lot from your bestseller, Freakonomics.

We were not completely disappointed. Freakanomics is always thought-provoking, and scores a number of bull eyes. For example, your attack on the theories of why crime plunged in the 90s (and, indirectly, the Giuliani myth) is pure fun (though, last time we looked, abortion is still legal and serious crime is going up).

A lot of your other stuff is lame.

Take the chapter on what teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common (they both cheat). No problem with the part about Sumo wrestlers. We know zero about the sport, but what you say is fascinating and believable.

But then you send up exactly the sort of pompous declaration you love to deflate. You present a set of interesting, credible statistics that probably show that a number of Chicago public school teachers have cheated on their students’ standardized tests—by changing answers after the tests were handed in.

The first problem with this story is that it is not news. The fact that public school teachers change answers is pre-Cambrian. Anyone who assumes otherwise doesn’t know much about public school teaching. We taught in New York City public schools for eight years, and some of our principals “accidentally” gave us the tests a few days in advance. You bet we reviewed the problems with the kids. Some teachers walked between the desks, mouthing correct answers to kids who promptly complied. Our incentives for doing so had nothing to do with negative consequences for lower scores.

Indeed, incentives—your own chosen ground—is where you guys really falter. You claim that teachers in Chicago cheated on standardized tests because of new “high-stakes testing” meaning testing that carries consequences for the teachers:

With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion. If the entire school does poorly, federal funding can be withheld; if the school is put on probation, the teacher stands to be fired.

To which we say, What happened to your righteous statistical thrusts?

Let’s make the likely assumption that many students in the Chicago public schools did poorly on the high-stakes test (though, strangely, the book never says how many). While you present compelling statistics that were used to catch teachers who probably cheated, you never say how many teachers were actually fired or were passed over for a raise or promotion. Taking a wild guess, we’d say, for tenured teachers, it was less than ten. And how many schools lost federal funding because of low test scores? You don’t say. (By the way, we’ve heard of stupid, counter-productive consequences, but this one takes the cake. Why punish kids for having bad teachers?). Oh, and how many schools were put on probation? Again, your book that relies so heavily on numbers does not say. And does putting a school on probation make the teachers teach better? We’ve never read any evidence that a similar program in New York State (SUR) did so.

Back to incentives. You incentive freaks don’t get that teachers don’t cheat on standardized tests because they want to get raises or promotions—raises are meager and unfair and why would you promote a good teacher out of the classroom—they cheat because they want to make sure the kids they hate, the kids who’ve shit on every carefully-planned math lesson for ten months, get promoted. Some of us cheat because we know keeping a kid back, according to studies that have been done on social promotion, makes the kid stupider.

Without any fear of rebuttal, we can state the main issue in nearly every public school classroom, especially those in neighborhoods with underequipped and overwhelmed families, is student behavior. Or, put in the vernacular of teacher lunchroom chatter—how to dump the bad kids and replace them with good kids. If you don’t know that, then you haven’t taught in a bad school (sorry, University of Chicago doesn’t qualify). While you rightly slam School Choice for being an empty promise, you overlook the reason for the idea’s popularity: school people embraced School Choice because it allows the schools to pick the kids—not the other way around. And what schools want are good kids.

Best,

Recharger The Dog