The Smarter Balanced Assessment Test appears be headed for the shredder as the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee voted unanimously on Monday to recommend passage of a bill to end the state’s membership in the consortium that produces the tests.

The newly-developed standardized online test, designed to measure student progress towards meeting the state’s Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics, has been controversial, its critics claiming it contains many errors and glitches that confuse and frustrate students.

But the committee’s vote may have had more to do with placating growing public hostility towards standardized testing than with flaws in this particular test, which could have been corrected over time. It’s an unfortunate instance of dumping out the baby with the bathwater.

The committee’s decision was warmly received by the Maine Education Association, whose members resent the stress of having to “teach to the test” or be judged by its results, as well as by the opt-out movement, which urges parents to refuse permission for their children to participate in any standardized school testing.

I’ll concede there are legitimate concerns over standardized tests. They may be administered too frequently, consume excessive class time, lead to homogenization of curricula, stigmatize schools with large populations of poor and non-English speaking students, and encourage fraud and criminality when tied to financial incentives for administrators and teachers.

I also accept that education isn’t exactly like a commodity, whose success can be judged by consumer satisfaction surveys, sales statistics and market shares.

Indeed, there’s something about standardized testing that evokes Charles Dickens’ scathing portrayal of Victorian educational philosophy in his novel “Hard Times,” “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Still, just because standardized tests are imperfect tools for measuring teaching efficacy and learning progress doesn’t mean they’re without value.

They may not measure creativity, originality or higher levels of critical thinking, and they’re not going to distinguish the student who simply studies hard or tests well from the next Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs. But they can gauge students’ reading comprehension, understanding of language structure, mastery of mathematical functions and reasoning, ability to solve real-world problems and fund of knowledge. This stuff they test isn’t the essence of learning, just the foundation of it.

After all, knowledge grows organically. Each generation informs the next, which makes intellectual advances and achieves a more sophisticated understanding of the universe by building on what it learned from the last. In the memorable phrase of 17th century English scientist Sir Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Standardized testing helps determine whether students have been able to climb onto the shoulders of giants, even if it doesn’t prove they’re able to see further from that perch.

Moreover, in a competitive world increasingly interconnected by trade, travel and technology, it’s important to know how a particular school, school system or country stacks up against others in learning results. The only practical way I’m aware of to compare educational achievement across a broad spectrum is through the quantitative metrics of standardized testing.

When the results of such testing show that a school or school district is substantially below the norm, the disclosure doesn’t have to occasion embarrassment or denial. Instead, it can present the opportunity for honest efforts at remediation and improvement.

This was the basic premise of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required annual standardized testing as a condition of receiving federal education funds. Sadly, its sanctions for failure to meet test result goals for six years in a row (closing a school, converting to a charter school, hiring a private company to run the school or having the state step in to operate the school) proved extremely unpopular with parents and educators.

President Obama has tried to soften No Child Left Behind by encouraging improved assessment tools and through his Race to the Top program, which provides $4.35 billion in grants to local districts for educational reform initiatives. But it’s still the law and a prerequisite to federal funding of local schools.

Standardized testing may also provide a useful check on the effectiveness of Mass Customized Learning (MCL), a revolutionary educational approach being implemented in many school districts around the state, including Auburn’s. The rationale of MCL is that every child learns at a different rate and in a different way and that mastery of subject matter, rather than the passage of defined time periods (such as semesters or school years), should determine when a student is ready to move to the next level.

MCL is designed to allow students to study learning modules, mostly online, at their own speed and to demonstrate proficiency as they complete each module. In this system, the teacher becomes less of a classroom instructor and more of a glorified ed tech, providing one-on-one assistance, as needed, to students as they navigate the modules. MCL also replaces the 100-scale grading system with one that assigns a number between 1 and 4 to each of a list of standards, closer to a pass-fail model.

It’s anyone’s guess how students will fare without teachers playing their traditional instructional, inspirational and integrative roles at the head of the classroom, or whether the new grading system will accurately and honestly assess student progress. But standardized testing of cohorts of students who are going through MCL should provide at least one indicator of its effectiveness (or lack thereof).

My proposed solution, then, to the shortcomings of standardized tests is to retain them but to appropriately scale their use, refine them and institute safeguards so they don’t monopolize classroom time, distort curricula, or tempt teachers and administrators to resort to improper methods to boost scores. As for those schools with high concentrations of poor and ELL students, they should receive increased funding to improve performance.

I don’t accept that the solution is to eliminate standardized testing entirely.

That’s not a solution. It’s a cop out.

Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is the founder of Museum L-A and author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be reached at [email protected].