Editors' Summary

The Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs offers cutting-edge research, presented in accessible ways, to help inform the academic research and policy debates on issues unique to urban areas. Broader economic and policy topics that have special applicability to urban settings are also treated. The papers and comments contained in this volume were presented at a conference at the Brookings Institution on October 24 and 25, 2002.

The papers are divided into two groups. This year's symposium focuses on urban education. Brian A. Jacob and Steven D. Levitt report the results of an experiment designed to detect cheating on standardized tests in Chicago Public Schools. Thomas Nechyba examines the impact of school reform in an urban setting by developing a simulation model in which parents choose where to live, decide whether their children attend public or private schools, and vote on tax levels. Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, and Gavin Samms evaluate the effect of school quality, as measured by local school test scores and composite school ratings, on housing values in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Brian A. Jacob explores the determinants of improved academic performance in Chicago Public Schools. The volume includes two other research papers on current issues in urban economics. Douglas S. Massey and Mary J. Fischer document expanding economic inequality across and within geographic regions. Bengte Evenson and William C. Wheaton explore local variation in land use regulations among towns in Massachusetts.

Symposium on Urban Education

Education is one of the most important services provided by urban and local governments. But many large urban school districts in the United States serve their students poorly, as indicated by low test scores, high dropout rates, high rates of teacher turnover, and other problems. These deficiencies have led affluent families with children to leave cities for the suburbs or to move their children to private schools. To the extent that such families move, urban tax bases and economic activity are reduced. To the extent that good students move to private schools, the average academic quality of the remaining public school students falls, which can reduce the quality of the education received in the public schools through the influence on peer group effects and expenditure on schools. For all of these reasons, education reform has emerged as a key issue in urban areas.

Catching Cheating Teachers: An Unusual Experiment

One approach to improving urban schools involves greater emphasis on high-stakes testing. Under this plan schools will be held accountable, through a variety of sanctions, for their students' failure to attain certain scores on standardized tests. Supporters claim that testing provides accountability and raises test scores. Critics note that test score gains have been shown to be test specific, and thus progress may be ephemeral. Another concern is that the emphasis on high-stakes testing may increase the temptation for students, teachers, and administrators to cheat on standardized tests.

Jacob and Levitt examine cheating by teachers using a methodology they developed in previous work. Roughly 100,000 Chicago Public School students take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills each spring, with retesting occurring in 117 classrooms three to four weeks later. Jacob and Levitt use a multinomial logit framework with past, current, and retest scores, demographics, and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables to identify suspicious answer strings (a series of answers to consecutive questions). The authors look at cheating in three types of classrooms: those with unusually large test score gains and highly suspicious patterns of answer strings; classrooms with suspicious answer strings but without unusually large test score gains; and classrooms with anonymous allegations of cheating. They compare the retest performance of these classrooms to two control groups that are not suspected of cheating: classrooms with large test score gains but not suspicious answer strings and classrooms that were chosen at random.

The main result is that classrooms that were suspected of cheating—based on the authors' methodology for identifying suspicious answer strings—saw dramatic declines in test results in the retest relative to the...