The Wall Street Journal’s John Hechinger reports out a Dept. of Education study that shows wild disparity in the level of difficulty between states when it comes to there 4th and 8th grade math and reading standardized tests. Hechinger focuses on states that made these tests even easier between 2005 (the last time DOE had such a study) and 2007.

However, the big-picture story is this: some states assign relatively hard reading and math tests and some states give pretty easy ones. A 4th grader that scored a 200 out of 500 on a Massachusetts math test actually displayed more math skills than an 8th grader in Tennessee who scored 250 out of 500.

And yet, the No Child Left Behind law — which says all 4th and 8th graders must be “proficient” in math and reading by 2014 — lets states write their own standardized tests and determine their own level of proficiency. So on the one hand NCLB emphasizes standardizes tests. And on the other, NCLB has no mechanism whatever for actually standardizing these tests between states.

Education Sec. Arne Duncan hopes to make state governors agree upon common standards.  For an administration so focused on quantifying progress in education, stopping the lack of standards in high-stakes standardized math and reading tests (the tests that determine if a school is “failing”) should be a more urgent priority.

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