1. “A Thing Worth Having Is A Thing Worth Cheating For” W.C. Fields US Actor (1880-1946)

2. Who cheats?

3. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.

4. But what about the third grader’s teacher ? Might she have an incentive to cheat? And if so, how would she do it?

6. Chicago Public Schools, a system that educates 400,000 each year.

7. The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns “high-stakes” testing.

8. The federal government mandated high-stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind law, signed by President Bush in 2002.

10. Schoolchildren, of course, have had incentive to cheat for as long as there have been tests. But high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat.

12. But if a teacher really wanted to cheat-and make it worth her while-she might collect the students’ answer sheets, and in the hour or so before turning them in to be read by an electronic scanner, erase the wrong answers and fill in correct ones.

13. How might it be detected?

15. What might a cheating teacher’s classroom look like?

16. Consider now the answer strings from the students in two sixth grade Chicago classrooms who took the identical math test.

17. Who cheats?

19. Who cheats?

20. Did fifteen out of twenty-two students somehow manage to reel off the same six consecutive correct answers (the d-a-d-b-c-b string) all by themselves?

23. 5.6 7.1 3.8 Student 14 4.9 6.3 3.6 Student 6 5.1 6.5 3.0 Student 3 7 th Grade Score 6 th Grade Score 5 th Grade Score