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- TrackingAcademics.
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- [http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=435 Dissent Magazine review of ''Freakonomics'']:
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- :It challenges the claim to be "unconventional" that Levitt can so easily think like management: should Board of Education employees be allowed to alter official testing documents without consequences? The alternative is to think the way plenty of people with regular jobs do: do you want to get somebody fired? If the central office institutes another test (without real solutions to improve education or means to fund those improvements, just a love of testing and measuring problems everyone already knows exist) and tells you your livelihood is resting on it, isn�t it understandable�even something worth being proud of�not to take that kind of treatment lying down? In the all-important political question of whom you�d like to have a beer with, is it a teacher who sabotages the latest Bush-style showboat education policy or the economist sitting at administrative headquarters watching that teacher get canned? That also belies Levitt�s claim that as an economist he doesn�t traffic in morality; what the reader sees is the quietly presumptuous management-class morality that is concerned with the rules and not the rule-makers.
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- <[[Brennen]]> The review's sort of a mixed bag, with some solid points about this kind of thing. If the getting-teachers-fired thing is true, Levitt can take a long walk off a short cliff as far as I'm concerned... One of these days I might actually read ''Freakonomics'', but don't hold your breath.
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