Gifford Miller weighed in Tuesday on the impressive results from the fourth grade English Language Arts test, concerned that these gains will propel Mayor Bloomberg into a second term. Under any circumstances, this would have been a tough nut for Mr. Miller to crack.

By waiting until two weeks after the fourth grade test results were released, the council speaker lost the immediacy that kept one of his opponents, Rep. Anthony Weiner, in the news for days.

But whatever momentum Mr. Miller’s analysis promised to give him came to an abrupt halt yesterday morning with the results of the reading and math tests that the city administered to third-, fifth-, sixth-, and seventh graders. The purported gains were so huge that it was inevitable that the Miller balloon instantly deflated.

It isn’t clear whether it was the administration’s initial intent to announce these scores yesterday. Rumor had it that the scores were to be released next week. Protocol usually has the scores delivered to each school prior to any public announcement, making me wonder whether the administration decided to cut Mr. Miller off at the knees before the Speaker’s negative analysis on the first results could gain traction.

Mr. Miller has found bad news in the midst of the city’s 9.9% gain on the fourth-grade test, which is administered and scored by the State Education Department. But both he and Mr. Bloomberg are wrong in the analysis of that exam. I have looked at the results, here in the city and in the rest of the state. I looked at the big cities and the elite suburbs. I looked at the charter schools and at the parochial schools. I looked at the worst schools and the best.

This was indeed a “Lake Wobegon” test, that might have been given in the mythical town chronicled by humorist Garrison Keillor, where all the children are above average. No one can point to their own effort as the reason for the increase in the overall score. Everyone went up. While there is some evidence of manipulation of the tested population, the upward consistency of the results strongly suggests that the state test was “easier,” which may mean that it was scored or normed more liberally.

Not that some of Mr. Miller’s points weren’t well taken (hey, he cited one of my articles on the test results in his footnotes). But the truth is that those scores prove nothing.

More troublesome for the mayor’s opponents are the results of the newly released tests, which showed consistent and often huge gains. This leads back to the trouble with the tests being administered and scored by the same folks we hope to evaluate. Is this a fair comparison year-to-year, or is this akin to a group of Eastern Bloc judges scoring a women’s Olympic gymnastic event in years past? It doesn’t take much to realize that the smart money is on the East Germans.

It will be a matter of skill for the candidates, particularly Mr. Miller, to raise this as an issue. The speaker’s first statement on this further round of tests, issued yesterday, will not make him mayor. Unless the mayor’s opponents can find a way to cast doubt on these results, they will have lost their key issue on which to attack Mr. Bloomberg’s record.

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Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, went home Tuesday to criticize the siting of a school next door to what he characterizes as a toxic waste dump. Since most of these sites were thrown into the mix while Mr. Ferrer was still in office, he seems to stand on shaky ground.

Those who want to stop projects can always find environmental grounds for doing so. After all, we live in a city in which the bar for determining risk keeps getting lower, lest the lawyers lose a bit of business. A look at the myth of lead “poisoning” in our city proves how gullible the press and politicos can be.

No one at the school in question has gotten sick, and there is plenty of research to indicate that even the suggestion of a problem will cause symptoms in some folks. Several years ago, the Board of Education was forced to permanently close a brand-new school built in what was once a dry-cleaning plant. Children and staff were becoming ill, or at least thought they were becoming sick.

Why would we close a needed school facility on such flimsy grounds? In the case of this current school, located in the Soundview community, Mr. Ferrer suggests that dirt blowing from a contaminated lot next door is the culprit. The bad effects may present themselves in later years, he maintains.

All this adds up to environmental racism, he charges. This is the catch-all charge to stop any project in the Bronx, where 85% of the population consists of “minorities.”

Perhaps it is educational racism to deny these children a school. The mayor could call Mr. Ferrer’s bluff and just blacktop the empty lot next door, encasing the “toxic dust,” rendering it harmless.

But maybe that’s not the kind of simple solution we seek in Mr. Ferrer’s “other” New York.