Oregon has been cheating students and parents on testing. The recent announcement that Oregon high schoolers will continue to take state Smarter Balanced tests, instead of switching to college board tests, doesn’t make things any better. Gov. Kate Brown has already torpedoed statewide testing.

In 2015, Brown signed a bill that made it easier for parents to opt students out of Smarter Balanced tests. It is one of the most permissive laws in the nation. The state teachers union was delighted. It can check “cripple tools to hold teachers accountable” off its bucket list. Weakening statewide testing weakens the ability to track how well teachers teach.

The original intent of the testing was to give the tests to students in grades three through eight and to high school juniors. It was an attempt to measure performance in reading, math, writing and more.

The state tests became a joke after the passage of the law. It’s now almost a game for students to see how few will take the tests. In the Bend-La Pine high schools the year after the law was signed, about half the high school students didn’t take the tests. What sort of good data about student performance could anyone hope to gather from that? Not much.

Of course, standardized tests have problems. The tests are imperfect yardsticks. Comprehensive tests eat into instructional time. Teachers say they feel obligated to teach to the test.

But teachers, parents and policymakers do need tools to evaluate the effectiveness of schools. The tools need to be available to make comparisons between schools and between states. There’s a “connection between high levels of student participation in assessment and system accountability — ensuring the success of every student.” And do you know who said that? That was our saboteur-in-chief Gov. Brown.

It’s no easy task to elevate a state’s education system. It’s all the more difficult when the governor apparently knows what’s right but signed the law to make it hard to even know how the state is doing.