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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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