What Do Corporate Earnings Reports and School Test Scores Have in Common?
The answer is that intense pressures upon corporate executives to satisfy investors and upon school leaders to raise test scores distort routine practices and too often leads to chicanery. Over the last decade, stories have emerged from multi-billion dollar corporate offices that CEOs doctored earnings reports to keep investors happy (while protecting their stock options), and educators fiddled with standardized test scores.
Before the 2008 financial meltdown, earnings statements (and forecasts) as signs of corporate success pushed corporate officers to claim as earnings funds that had little to do with actual transactions with customers in a given year. For example, Computer Associates and Xerox CEOs claimed revenues in one year that their
