The test didn’t make them cheat
A tough piece I posted by Bill Ayers about theAtlanta test cheating indictments said the road to the scandal “runs right through the White House.” Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who may be better known for his radical activism during the 1960s and ’70s. (During the 2008 presidential campaign right-wing commentators incorrectly said he had a close relationship with then candidate Barack Obama, whom Ayers supported.)Michael J. Feuer, dean of the graduate school of education and human development at the George Washington University and president-elect of the National Academy of Education, takes exception to Ayers’ post in this equally hard-hitting piece in Education Week. Feuer questions Ayers’ argument on moral and other grounds. Here are some excerpts:
… For Bill Ayers, an education professor emeritus from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Atlanta story proves that “teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the ‘outcomes’ both incentivizes cheating and is a worthless proxy for learning.”
Mr. Ayers goes further. Not only does he attribute the alleged cheating to the testing