The Pie: An Economics Podcast

How Should Parents Respond When Grades are Good, But Test Scores are Bad?

The Pie: An Economics Podcast

Show Notes

When a child brings home good grades but low standardized test scores, which signal should parents pay attention to? In this episode, Ariel Kalil of the UChicago Harris School of Public Policy discusses new research showing that parents lean heavily on grades, and high grades often crowd out the extra help low test scores would otherwise prompt. With pandemic learning losses disguised by inflated grades, Kalil discusses how this dynamic may mean that struggling kids aren't getting the support they need.

More from The Pie: An Economics Podcast

Oct 13, 2026

Roughly 3 million Americans own private businesses and have a net worth of at least $5 million. Together they hold more than $50 trillion, about 13 times the wealth of the entire Forbes 400. In this episode, Chicago Booth economist Eric Zwick discusses The Everywhere Millionaire, his new book with Owen Zidar, which draws on a decade of tax data to characterize this class of car dealers, dentists, and beer distributors in towns across the country.

Sep 29, 2026

By 2024, inflation was falling and unemployment was low, yet consumer confidence had sunk to levels last seen during the Great Recession. In this episode, Erik Hurst of Chicago Booth and his co-author Christina Patterson draw on payroll records for roughly 16 million workers to show how wages fell behind prices during the recent inflationary period and haven't caught back up.

Sep 15, 2026

Last December, Australia banned social media for anyone under 16. Four months later, only one in four 14- and 15-year-olds were complying, a share that has since fallen further. In this episode of The Pie, Leonardo Bursztyn, the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and co-director of BFI's Political Economics Initiative, discusses why the ban hasn't worked, and what a successful one might entail.

Sep 1, 2026

US sanctions on Russian banks have complex spillovers for the importers and exporters who transact in dollars. On this episode of The Pie, Brent Neiman, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, returns to discuss recent research tracing how those sanctions ripple through the global payments network, and whether they are pushing heavily sanctioned economies away from the dollar and toward China's yuan.

Aug 18, 2026

When a police officer is shot, is it safer to wait for an ambulance or to be driven straight to the hospital in a squad car? In this episode of The Pie, Prachi Sanghavi, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Health Policy Data Lab, discusses new research tracing how shooting victims across 18 U.S. cities reach the hospital, and what it reveals about a decades-old debate over pre-hospital care.

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