We live in an era of deregulation. It's unpopular to call for regulation and government intervention, but I'm going to do it anyway. 

It was not very long ago that people were routinely cheated of their hard-earned income whenever they went to the market. Scales were often fixed to give short weight, and containers didn't always contain what they claimed to. Most of us now shop with confidence because there are government regulations and inspectors. The problem hasn't disappeared - some scales or taxi meters are still rigged - but those who try to give us short measure risk being caught and punished. 

We in education also need government regulation of "weights and measures," except that our weights and measures are not pounds of tomatoes or taxi fare meters - they're standardized tests and test scores. What's the problem? 

A good example comes from a survey done by Dr. John Cannell of Friends for Education (discussed in this column on Dec. 6, 1987 and April 24, 1988 and by Daniel Koretz in the summer 1988 issue of the American Educator). It showed that, according to the reported results on the most widely-used standardized tests, the majority of students in all states were like all the children in Lake Wobegone - "above average"! 

How could this impossibility happen? The answer is that the "average" in standardized tests is not what most people think it is. If your child, school or district is reported to be above average, you would reasonably think that it means placing in the top half of those now taking the test. Not so. What it really means is that you're in the top half compared to a selected sample group that took the test as much as 8 to 10 years ago! Shouldn't parents and the public have an easy way of knowing that? 

Dr. Cannell' s survey also showed annual improvements in test scores in states where school people had access to the test items in advance but not in states where there was no such access. Clearly, lots of kids are extensively prepped for tests, while others take them cold. Shouldn't we know which states, districts or schools have access to test items? Should we regulate such access? Are prepped students who score well "better" than those who are not prepped and score poorly because their teachers may be covering other, richer material? We don't know. 

Also, districts may decide to change from one test to another. If the new test is "easier," student scores will likely go up - especially if districts report the "rise" in comparison to the scores on the old, "harder" test (and don't bother to tell you about the change). Or if the new test gets you the same or worse results, districts may claim that the new test was much "harder" than the old one or so different that the kids needed time to "adjust" to it. Shouldn't we have a way of knowing when a new test is tougher or easier and in regulation to what? 

Furthermore, the test scores just don't tell us very much. If you're told that 70 percent of the kids in a school or district are above average, what can you expect them to be able to do? Write a decent letter? Understand an editorial? Figure out the weekly cost of shopping from the supermarket ads in the newspaper? The fact is that you can't tell from the way test scores are reported what students can or cannot do. 

One way to remedy this would be to create a National Bureau of Educational Weights and Measures. What would such an agency do? It could: • approve various tests before they could be sold after checking into their accuracy, validity, etc.; 

 • publish a "critical directory" of tests that would describe and evaluate the major strengths and weaknesses of each available test; 

• do the necessary research so that scores on different tests can be "equated" with each other to allow people to know whether the 73rd percentile on the Iowa Test is the same as the 48th on the Stanford Test and the 61st on the McGraw-Hill Test, etc.; 

• find better ways of assessing knowledge and skills than the currently inadequate multiple-choice, paper and pencil tests; 

• develop and enforce standards for the use of standardized tests, including test security, updating of norms, reporting of results, etc.; 

• use government funds to do more rigorously what Dr. Cannell and his group did-survey all states and localities to see how they're testing and reporting the results; 

• provide assistance to states and localities that want to simplify, regularize and improve their testing programs and their procedures for reporting to the public and measuring progress, for example, by participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); 

• investigate complaints about tests and testing practices and have the authority to rectify abuses; 

• handle complaints from parents, students or teachers about unfair or ambiguous or faulty test items; 

• help teachers, students, parents, the press, business and the general public with information that will enable them to understand test results and ask intelligent questions about the test being used and the results reported. 

These are all things that need to be done so that we get honest measures. No one is dong it now. Sure, we generally don't like government regulations and wince at the thought of a possible new bureaucracy. But, in spite of this, I don't see anyone trying to abolish state, local or national agencies that exists to make sure that helpless consumers don't get cheated. The public wants to feel safe from rigged scales or any other device to short-change the consumer. It's time to adopt the same philosophy in education.