{"id":3368,"date":"2011-04-15T07:18:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T11:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3368"},"modified":"2017-07-04T13:56:49","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T20:56:49","slug":"on-laws-and-effects-that-arent-so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3368","title":{"rendered":"On laws and effects that aren’t so"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a certain piquancy in the utter solemnity with which Wikipedia entries assume the truthfulness of\u00a0Baumol’s cost disease<\/a> and Campbell’s law<\/a>. The first is a putative truism that labor-intensive fields have lower productivity increases by dint of that trait, and the second is another putative truism that all stakes on measures distort the trustworthiness of said measures. I’ve explained before why the so-called Baumol’s cost disease is an artifact of selection from a distribution<\/a>\u00a0(briefly: over any period, some sectors are going to have greater measures of productivity increases than others). When I saw Sharon Nichols, Gene Glass, and David Berliner use the concept of Campbell’s law in their writing about high-stakes testing, for me it came under the category of “okay, you’re trying to explain a concept and here’s something that is close enough it’s easy to grab.”<\/p>\n

It’s been picked up enough by others, and portrayed as some iron law of human nature, and that portrayal is neither accurate nor helpful to those of us who are critical of high-stakes testing. Of course there are unintended consequences of system high stakes’ being tied to measures, consequences that one could call a distortion of the original measure. Because this is human behavior in a systemic context, the extent of such a distortion is an open question, and to assert that there is a level of corruption that is uniform (or uniformly high) is both unrealistic and closes off all sorts of avenues for interesting and useful research<\/strong>. How<\/strong><\/em> people game systems is an important area of potential research precisely for those of us who are worried about the national culture of test prep.<\/p>\n

Here’s why, or one example: if Campell’s law is universal with uniformly high and corrupting consequences, then our broad culture of high-stakes testing makes any test whatsoever carry the same social-psychological environment as something that really carries high stakes. Formative testing? Useless, because it’ll generally carry the patina of high stakes testing, and there goes your practical and political alternative to high-stakes testing.<\/p>\n

I don’t really believe that, because I don’t think the corrupting effects of high stakes is universal. I just don’t know where and how it is most or least influential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a certain piquancy in the utter solemnity with which Wikipedia entries assume the truthfulness of\u00a0Baumol’s cost disease and Campbell’s law. The first is a putative truism that labor-intensive fields have lower productivity increases by dint of that trait, and the second is another putative truism that all stakes on measures distort the trustworthiness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,19,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-out-of-left-field-friday","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Sk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8472,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions\/8472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}