In the interest of fairness, the CPS resorted to a lottery. For a researcher, this is a remarkable boon. A behavioral scientist could hardly design a better experiment in his laboratory. Just as the scientist might randomly assign one mouse to a treatment group and another to a control group, the Chicago school board effectively did the same. Imagine two students, statistically identical, each of whom wants to attend a new, better school. Thanks to how the ball bounces in the hopper, one student goes to the new school and the other stays behind. Now imagine multiplying those students by the
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