Fourth-grade students in nearly every state in our nation are required to take statewide exams. So why was there a fiasco last month when New York's fourth-graders were tested? Everything that could have gone wrong did so, including late delivery of tests, poorly prepared test questions and possible cheating.

The State Education Department gave an $8.4 million contract to a California-based company to prepare and administer the tests to public and private school students. Why wasn't this work done by a New York State firm? At least that would have cut delivery costs and avoided transportation delays. How could our highly paid education officials approve such shoddy security and testing procedures?

There was talk about cheating in the tests because material was released in December in the form of sample questions in a teachers' guide that many students probably studied in advance. Two of the reading passages on the test had been published in a national magazine giving some students an unfair advantage.

Critics say that teachers and school administrators have long opposed standardized tests because their competence could be questioned if the students test poorly. Even before the tests were administered, a teachers' union official spoke out against using the results to evaluate schools.

When news of the fourth-grade testing blunder came out, State Education Commissioner Richard Mills did what any good bureaucrat would do when faced with a monumental error: He appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate what went wrong.

This case of mishandling student achievement tests brings to mind the disclosure several years ago that a nationally praised, highly envied elementary school in Fairfield, CT hired a former FBI agent to investigate parents' claims that a school administrator changed answers on students' test sheets. Fairfield real estate agents used these test scores to praise the advantages of one neighborhood over another.

An independent reviewer found conclusive evidence of tampering on the test papers. The school had been getting high scores for a number of years but efforts to determine if previous scores were inflated proved futile because the answer sheets no longer existed.

When students were retested under strict supervision, test scores fell, leading to the school board's decision to dismiss the award-winning school principal who eventually retired.