RALEIGH – “It will be a shock to the system. But I think the citizens and parents have a right to know the truth.”

With that statement to The Charlotte Observer’s Pam Kelley, Howard Lee – former state senator, former Chapel Hill mayor, current chairman of the State Board of Education – has made a play for the Education Leadership Hall of Fame. He is talking about proposals to raise North Carolina’s pitiful low academic standards, which have misled the public into believing that an overwhelming majority of public schoolchildren are proficient in grade-level reading and math. Lee’s place of honor isn’t assured yet, however. There must be follow-through on his promises to do something meaningful about the problem.

While a succession of state politicians preened for the cameras and collected meaningless awards from national school-establishment lobbies, the testing program they created and implemented in North Carolina public schools during the 1990s came to be known as one of the least-informative, least-rigorous systems of standardized testing in the United States. The gap between grade-level proficiency on the state’s own tests and grade-level proficiency on independent national tests is a yawning one – in 2005, while 84 percent of North Carolina fourth-graders tested proficient in reading on the state’s end-of-grade (EOG) test, only 29 percent rated as proficient readers in the National Assessment of Educational Progress test that year.

How did our EOGs become so notoriously easy to pass? Kelley explained the background in some detail in Sunday’s Observer, including this critical passage:

Those scores were set low because N.C. school board members wanted teachers, who could earn bonuses for good scores, to buy into the new program, state officials say. And they wanted to give teachers time to adjust their lessons so they were covering material on the test.

Officials admittedly to Kelley that they had purposefully “set the bar low” back in 1992, “with plans to raise it over time.” But that never happened.

There is a lot of blame to go around for this ghastly failure of leadership, a failure that has harmed hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren assured falsely that they were learning what they needed to learn to succeed in high school and beyond. Educators wanted to keep their bonuses coming and their jobs secure. Department of Public Instruction officials knew their tests were screwy and that they’d be blamed if the full truth came out. Politicians loved the positive headlines derived from annual rises in the percentage of students at grade-level, and didn’t want to rock the party boat by asking pesky questions.

Even independent policy analysts share some of the blame. The evidence that something was horribly wrong with the testing program was clear despite the murkiness of DPI’s reports and explanations. The John Locke Foundation, for example, should have been on the ball here years ago, detecting performance gaps between state and national tests, exposing the fact that students could guess their way to passing some of the state tests by having to get only a third of the questions correct, observing that the tests appear to have been getting easier over time, and proposing independent, nationally normed tests as a remedy for the problem.

Fooled you. Been there, done all that.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.