Toward Truth in Testing

It seems that some teachers and administrators, when offered incentives (within systems such as No Child Left Behind) for boosting students' test scores, act unethically to inflate them. The Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern recounts how two brave education officials are confronting assertions of "spectacular student progress" by forcing an outside audit of the tests. Their efforts, he writes, should serve as a model for making all states "come clean" and (in education secretary Arne Duncan's words) "'stop lying to children.'"