I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided.

I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.

Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)

I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.

Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.

[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]