All Around the Interwebs
Check out my new piece at Slate, which puts the Atlanta standardized test cheating scandal in some historical perspecitve. Sadly, this is not an isolated case:
In the late 1980s, states began to experiment with offering schools financial awards for improving test scores. As the local media filled with optimistic stories about rising scores, a West Virginia doctor named John Cannell wondered why so many of his teenage patients complained of feeling lost at school. In 1988, Cannell published a classic research paper (PDF) reporting that most school districts in all 50 states boasted average test scores higher than their state's average—a statistical impossibility if the districts had been honest about performance. In his indispensible 2008 book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, Harvard psychometrician Daniel Koretz writes, "This phenomenon quickly became known as the 'Lake Wobegon effect,' after Garrison Keillor's mythical town where 'all the women are strong, all the