Current Events
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Education Next (Winter 2004):Teacher Cheating: How Prevalent Is It?
Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating by Brian Jacob and Steven Levitt ![]()
This article describes the results of a three-year investigation into cheating by school personnel. At the invitation of the chief education officer of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan, a statistical algorithm was developed to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Jacob and Levitt write that "The goals of this research were to measure the prevalence of cheating by teachers and administrators and to analyze the factors that predict cheating... Finally, we examined whether cheating responds to incentives, notably the introduction of a high-stakes testing regime in 1996".
The E-Accountability Foundation: Their research has great relevancy to the question whether the No Child Left Behind legislation will, with the accountability mandates clearly established, encourage this type of misinformation and jeopardize accurate assessments of school performance at a national level. |