Hawaii’s public schools are ranked 50th out of 50 in a new nationwide survey of how our educators are meeting George W. Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind law, says a new study conducted by the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, which I had always thought was a hate group, but hey—nobody’s perfect. Anyway, the law says each student’s math and reading test scores have to go up, or the schools risk getting “restructured”—ie, no mo’ money. Now all this news sounds just dreadful, except for a couple things. First, each state has to come up with the reading and math tests, so you have 50 different states using 50 different criteria to compete for federal money. Second, and more importantly, is that using tests to gauge how schools are doing is nonsense. And we’ve known this for some time. “The most profound misuse of educational tests these days is to employ a traditionally constructed standardized achievement test… and use those scores as a reflection of school quality,” said UCLA professor emeritus and nationally-recognized expert on testing James Popham three years ago during the Mar. 28, 2002 Frontline documentary “Testing Our Schools.” Popham further said that standardized tests only measure “what children bring to school, not what they learn there” and that most policymakers advocating No Child Left Behind “are dirt-ignorant regarding what these tests should and should not be used for.”