A week doesn’t go by, without a mainstream media story on the “horrors” of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that columnists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.For years, the American public has been...