We are reaching for those world-class standards we have spoken of in the past. We are supposed to believe that fourth-graders flunked the test because the standards were difficult. The standards posted on the Colorado Department of Education website are so vague that one cannot tell what the real standards were without seeing the test. Without a specific knowledge of the curriculum, it is impossible to tell. Vague standards like this are worthless for evaluating student progress, and government entities typically generate the vaguest standards of all.
Good scholarship demands a principled search for the truth.
The political process places a premium on satisfying various interest groups with far less regard for principle. When politicians make policy, standards suffer. Just after the Federal government began enlarging its control of the schools in the 1960's, scores on privately produced national achievement tests, the Iowa Tests and the SAT among them, began declining in the 1960s. Rather than admitting that they have destroyed the schools with 30 years of failed experiments, the politicians and educrats want to kill the bearer of bad tidings by substituting government-made tests for the private ones. Standards will lose again.