Connecticut’s biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, is getting angrier at the state Education Department about the standardized tests recently given to students in Grades 3 through 8 and 11 in the state’s public schools, whose dismal results were announced last week.

According to the union, the test doesn’t really measure what students know, and because it is taken on a computer, it is unfair to young children from poor households who don’t know how to use one.

But all tests are imperfect, matters of judgment; a child’s ignorance of computers is itself a measure of his educational progress; and the union’s real objection is not really to the particular test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test (yes, only educrats could devise such a pretentious name), but to any standardized testing at all. 

Instead the union wants a system that evaluates students not by standardized test scores but by the opinion of their teachers so that, as in Lake Wobegon, all students can be considered above average — and their teachers can be too.

The Malloy administration has taken more interest in educational performance than its predecessors and bravely has held fast to standardized testing despite the union’s political clout. Testing at least shows concern and federal law requires it in one form or another.

But testing is one thing and standards are something else. Standards are requirements students have to meet for promotion from grade to grade and for graduation from high school.

No one in authority in public education in Connecticut really wants standards and so there are none anymore. These days nearly all students in Connecticut are promoted from grade to grade, given high school diplomas, and sent out into the world whether or not they have learned anything.

Scores on the annual standardized tests mean little if anything to them and deceiving them and their parents about their education is considered better policy than telling them the truth. After all, the workplace will tell them the truth eventually, and standards now are considered impossible politically.

Besides, regardless of whether the tests are well-designed, their results are always the same, correlating overwhelmingly with demographics — household composition and income. Fatherless children who are neglected at home and live disproportionately in the cities do poorly. Students with actual parents involved in their lives, who live disproportionately in the suburbs, do well.

That is, what happens in school is only secondary to education. What matters most is what happens at home.

The test results also always show that students do better in English than in math, since no knowledge of math is necessary to watch television, which is how most kids spend their time outside school while their parents and teachers complain about “overtesting” — that is, one lousy test per year. Even in the best-performing schools as many as a third of students fail to perform at grade level in English and as many as half fail to perform at grade level in math. As a result, remedial high school work has become a big part of Connecticut’s state university and community college systems, where two-thirds of freshmen take remedial math, English, or both.

This aspect of Connecticut’s educational failure results directly from social promotion, which causes educational inflation, in which the state now pays for 16 years of education to accomplish what it used to accomplish in 12.

“We call our schools free,” Robert Frost wrote 75 years ago, “because we are not free to stay away from them till we are 16 years of age.” A few years ago Connecticut raised the high school dropout age to 18 but that didn’t improve education either. Instead, like everything else, it just ran up the costs. Education is not likely to improve until students see that failure has consequences for them.