It was Mr. Levitt who nailed a bunch of Chicago public-school teachers for artificially inflating their students’ standardized test scores. I’m dying to tell you exactly how he did it, but I don’t want to spoil any surprises. His account of the affair in Freakonomics reads like a detective novel.
The evidence is right there in front of you: Mr. Levitt actually reproduces all the answer sheets from two Chicago classrooms and challenges you to spot the cheater. Then he shows you how it’s done. He points to suspicious patterns that you almost surely overlooked. Suspicious, yes, but not conclusive–maybe there is some legitimate explanation. Except that Mr. Levitt slowly piles pattern on pattern, ruling out one explanation after another until only the most insidious one remains. The resulting tour de force is so convincing that it eventually cost 12 Chicago schoolteachers their jobs.
The Case of the Cheating Teachers would make a fascinating book, but in Mr. Levitt’s hands it is compressed into 12 breathtaking pages. Then he is on to his next adventure–the Case of the Cheating Sumo Wrestlers. Here an entirely different kind of data (the win-loss records from tournaments) gets the Levitt treatment: the identification of a suspicious pattern, a labyrinth of reasoning to rule out the innocent explanations and a compelling indictment.
Then it’s on to another question, and another and another. Were lynchings, as their malevolent perpetrators hoped, an effective way to keep Southern blacks ‘in their place’? Do real-estate agents really represent their clients’ interests? Why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers? Which parenting strategies work and which don’t? Does a good first name contribute to success in life?” (WSJ Opinion Journal)
