There's an interesting slippage here, though. Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"? Chait says it is, but I doubt that that's the first term that would leap to mind for most people. Journalism isn't a game like basketball, where the goal is to win or rack up the most points or the highest test scores. It's an (arguably debased, but still) profession. Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth. If journalism were incentivized like teaching, Chait might be paid based on how many people link to his stories -- which might lead him to go around the web linking to himself on random comments threads. That would, arguably, be "cheating" -- but it also would have little to do with journalistic ethics as we usually understand them.

This is an important distinction. Behaving ethically matters, but how it matters, and what it means, depends strongly on the context in which it occurs. Thus, the fact that teachers in the Atlanta schools were "cheating" on tests tells you a lot about how teachers are perceived and what is expected of them. Ethics for teachers is not, apparently, first and foremost about educating their students, or broadening their minds. Rather, ethics for teachers in our current system consists in following the rules. The implicit, linguistic signal being given is that teachers are not like journalists or doctors, committed to a profession and to the moral code needed to achieve their professional goals. Instead, they are like athletes playing games, or (as Chait says) like children taking tests.

Using "cheating" as an ethical lens tends to both trivialize and infantilize teacher's work. Professions with social respect and social capital, like doctors and lawyers, collaborate in the creation of their own standards. The assumption is that those standards are intrinsic to the profession's goals, and that, therefore, professionals themselves are best equipped to establish and monitor them. Teachers' standards, though, are imposed from outside -- as if teachers are children, or as if teaching is a game.

High-stakes testing, then, does leads to cheating. It does not create unethical behavior -- but it does create the particular unethical behavior of "cheating." And while it's true that unethical behavior in itself is not a reason to get rid of incentives for excellence, it seems like this scandal might be a good moment to think about what incentives we actually are creating, and why.