Reply #59: That's correct. [View All]

[FBaggins]

Perhaps you're limited to an "elementary" understanding, but if you've ever taken a serious economics class you would learn that "incentive" and "profit" aren't the same thing.

Two of us who work in the field

You don't, in fact, "work in the field". You provide the end service. That's like a car mechanic claiming that he knows all about how the funding of a rebate program works and how the auto company is hoping to restructure their debt.

Tell me... WHY would the NBER publish papers looking at the impact of fiscal incentives on designations of students if there was no such thing?

Why didn't they just say "doesn't happen" ? They could have saved lots of time.


Note - there are other possible incentives that aren't financial in nature. I don't know enough about the post-NCLB rules, but in some areas "special needs" children were not included in standardized test reporting. I have a coworker that says this was the case just a couple years ago here in NC, but I have no personal knowledge of this. You've no doubt read of schools/teachers who have cheated in order to report better scores... would you put it past them to take some of the lower-performing students out of the pool by classifying them as "these kids don't count" ???