It is never pleasant to hear that your child has failed the state assessment test in math or reading. It is downright maddening to hear that the state assessment test has failed your child.

And it is rather head-spinning to hear that it is the person in charge of the state educational system—in this case, New York State Education Commissioner David M. Steiner— who has concluded that existing state assessment tests are not giving an accurate reading as to how well each student is being prepared for education at the next level.

The best part of the upsetting story is that Steiner knows that an assessment test is not supposed to be a game of “Gotcha!” It is not meant to be a way to pin a label on a student, a school or a district and call it a day.

Steiner wisely compares a school system’s assessment test to a doctor’s thermometer. Using it can tell you that something is wrong and requires attention. It doesn’t tell you what is wrong, or how to fix it.

Similarly, turning assessment tests, even high school Regents exams, into high-stakes, make-it-or-break-it definitions of individual success or failure puts far too much emphasis on these snapshots at the expense of overall curriculum design. And it turns the testing process into an adversarial relationship rather than the collaborative exercise it must be.

It is to Steiner’s credit that, rather than simply point with pride to the rising trend in state assessment scores, he is being honest enough to point out that the state’s own research is pointing toward more troubling conclusions.

Students who have been rated “proficient” or better on state assessments in grades 3 through 8 are later coming up short on Regents exams given to high school students. Which means the students were not so proficient after all.

Students who have passed their Regents tests, supposedly showing that they were ready to take on college-level work, are proving to be falling well short of that standard once they actually reach campus. Which means they need expensive remedial training or, worse, are at increased risk of becoming college drop-outs.

The most obvious answer is better tests, which really measure how each student, and each student cohort, has been prepped for the next stage. The second answer is to simultaneously design a statewide curriculum that will, with those improved assessment tests, create a proper, useful and continually updated loop that tells teachers how their students are doing, principals how their teachers are doing, superintendents how their principals are doing, and the taxpayers how their state is doing.

One state assessment test will not be able to measure the success of hundreds of local curricula. Only a standardized path of instruction is open to a standardized assessment of accomplishment.

All that is expensive, of course. Tests have to be continuously updated, written in ways that they cannot just be graded by machine, and evaluated in concert, not competition, with the authors of the state’s public school curriculum.

Money is to education as oxygen is to life. Having it does not guarantee success. Lacking it guarantees failure.

The state should pony up the money needed to design proper assessments along with a valid curriculum to assess. And, having done so, only then will it be able to make a valid demand to get its money’s worth.