The tests are not the problem

It's sort of like an old-time prison warden, warning that if you insist on making a fuss about how many inmates are beaten to death, you're just about forcing him to bury them in unmarked graves and list them as escaped.

In Atlanta, a huge scandal now implicates 180 "educators" in decades of blatant cheating on standardized student tests.

Meantime, USA Today reports, an investigation this spring "found statistical indications of cheating in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington, D.C."

Administrators took part or helped in the cover-ups. Whistle-blowers were punished. The cheaters -- after decades of passing kids along without any real mastery of the material -- don't even get points for sophistication. In some cases, we're expected to believe kids who didn't finish the tests skipped ahead to answer some of the harder questions near the back -- and got them all correct.

Should all the blame rest on teachers? Of course not. One lowly front-line classroom instructor can hardly change, single-handedly, a system that sends them pupils inadequately prepared from the lower grades; refuses to investigate the legal status of non-English-speakers who slow entire classes to a crawl; lards up the curriculum with a bunch of politically correct special-interest pleadings; turns the schools into Pavlov's laboratory for all the latest social engineering experiments; then deprives them of the most basic disciplinary tools, including the ability to expel the incorrigible.

Yet all too often, what we hear from today's education establishment is that those who imposed these testing regimes -- in part through the federal No Child Left Behind Act -- are getting just the cheating they deserve. Why, a coalition is actually organizing a "Save Our Schools" rally in Washington, D.C., on July 30, calling for an end to standardized tests in evaluating students, teachers and schools.

The taxpayers grow weary of spending billions on a coercion-based school system that turns out far too many graduates barely able to read a bus schedule or explain the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and we're expected to believe the way to "save" these job factories is to take away the tools necessary for taxpayers to evaluate them?

"Students are the ultimate victims of scams to fake higher scores." USA Today editorialized Monday. "They are being written off as hopeless by teachers who believe the only way to raise their scores is to cheat. Then they're being lied to about their achievement level."

The tests are not, themselves, the solution. But publicizing the results of rigorous testing is a vital first step.

And no one who says, "Your test made me cheat because it was too hard" should be in any position to guide or instruct impressionable children.