Chait all wet on high-stakes testing

Jonathan Chait has been a critic of the perverse incentives that distort our healthcare delivery system.  But he is willfully oblivious to the perverse incentives created by overemphasis on high-stakes testing in public school systems. 

Here's his reaction to the Atlanta cheating scandal, in which former Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other 34 teachers, principals and administrators were indicted on allegations that they “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores”:

[Eugene Robinson's] factual premise — that connecting teacher and principal incentives to student achievement leads to more cheating — is probably true. Is this a reason to get rid of incentives? No, it isn’t.

Shooting skeet was excellent practice. It taught them to shoot skeet."*

In today's Times, Michael Winerip spotlights an important limitation to a widely publicized longitudinal study that found that elementary school teachers who significantly raise students' test scores have a positive impact on their long-term prospects.Winerip notes that the testing in question took place before the era of "high-stakes testing," in which teachers are under relentless pressure to teach to the test and curricula are bent to that end.  Winerip's caveat:

Whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell. It may well be that teachers under pressure to raise their students’ scores through extensive test preparation will get inflated results that do not carry over positively to adulthood.

There's a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work: if you teach to the test, the test results have a different import. Winerip concludes with a personal anecdote that I can bookend with my later experience as a parent: