Teacher cheating, student testing and the great education tradeoff
This piece is part of a leadership roundtable on the right way to approach teacher incentives — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
Try this thought experiment. Imagine I told you there was a way to improve student performance on standardized tests by 15 percent over the course of a several years, but it came with the downside that every year a small percentage of students, teachers and principals would almost certainly try to game the system by cheating. Would you take th
