Catching Cheaters

I somehow missed this post a while back on Freakonomics about catching cheaters and wanted to point our readers to the actual post. More importantly is this quote that caught my attention (thoughts follows):

Are school districts more likely today to be receptive to an outsider selling cheating detection services than they were back when we first thought about doing it? Definitely not. What programs like No Child Left Behind have changed, however, is the stake that higher levels of government have in getting rid of cheating. State and federal governments are now allocating large amounts of money based on test scores. They don’t want to be in the business of generously rewarding cheaters. Relative to the money at stake, the costs of detecting cheaters is trivial — maybe a nickel per student per year, which seems like a small price to pay. Unlike individual school districts, state governments care about catching cheaters — or at least, they should.

So it seems like the incentives here are not aligned properly... and yet this isn't a bigger issue in the news? Maybe I'm missing something here but this does not seem right... thoughts?

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