By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
JAMAICA PLAIN, Mass. – A group calling itself FairTest.org has collected the endorsements of various far left groups, including the National Education Association, to join in “the fight to roll back high stakes testing requirements in the nation’s schools,” EducationNews.org reports. 
    
FairTest.org supporters claim standardized tests prevent students from being creative and working collaboratively with others – skills that are needed to “thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy.”
    
Actually, if American students haven’t mastered the basics of math and reading, they’ll have to be extraordinarily creative to find any kind of decent job once they leave school.
    
Worrying about a student’s creative skills instead of her academic skills is nonsensical. It’s like telling a young football player to practice his touchdown celebration before he knows how to throw and catch a football properly.
    
The reality is that standardized tests are currently the best way to gauge whether or not children are actually learning how to read and solve basic math problems.
    
What really bothers the FairTest.org malcontents is what standardized tests are revealing about many American teachers – that they’re failing to effectively teach children, or that they are wasting precious class time teaching kids about the wonderfulness of labor unions and how to stage an effective protest.
    
Lousy student test scores have a way of getting taxpayers to question what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms. So the leftists gripe about “teaching to the test” and how “high stakes testing” fosters widespread cheating.
    
That’s all smokescreen. Having community members administer the tests would stop the cheating almost immediately. And if the tests are based on the approved curriculum, then what’s the problem of “teaching to the test,” anyway?
    
It’s the accountability and oversight that the FairTest crowd really despises. The louder they protest, the more value we think these standard tests have.