We live in a society that demands instant information. Before the last ticket is sold Sunday evening, we know which film had the highest gross over the weekend. Before the last of the leftover turkey is consumed after Thanksgiving, analysts have already evaluated pre-Christmas retail sales. And it seems to me that our mayor made a lot of money during a previous career putting instantaneous information on the desks of those working in our financial markets.

Living in a world of huge technological advances, one would think that it would take almost no time to grade the test papers of the children in our school system. But that isn’t the case. It takes weeks to generate test results on the city’s standardized tests. The state is even slower at marking its exams. There are still no results for the 4th Grade English Language Arts test administered two months ago, or the 8th Grade ELA administered in mid-January.

The results of the state math tests that students will take in May won’t get back to the schools until the fall, too late to be really helpful in making promotional or class assignment decisions.

There is a huge hidden cost associated with this inefficiency. Because it takes so long to generate test results, the tests themselves are given much earlier in the school year than they should be. The result of this is a skewing of the school year, “front loading” the most intensive work to end before the school year is even close to over.

It is human nature to ease the pressure once the tests have been administered. Next week, students in the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grades will have taken their ELA tests. In two weeks, the mathematics tests will be given. Although there will still be more than two months of the school year remaining, the only true measure of progress will have already been taken, even though the results won’t be known for weeks.

But what the students, parents, teachers, principals, and district office educrats will know is that whatever goes on from the point that the children put down their no. 2 pencils until the last official day of school on June 28, there will be no academic evaluation of that period.

Standardized tests are designed to determine where a student stands academically at a point in time. They should be administered as near as possible to the conclusion of the school year. Certainly we possess the technical know-how to make this happen. After all, the re-tests administered at the conclusion of the remedial summer school program are graded within days.

The multiple-choice portions of the tests can literally be marked overnight by machine. But even essays and math problems can be quickly graded. Current and even retired teachers can be recruited to work overtime to make this happen within days.

For generations, New York State has administered Regents tests for high school students in mid-June, and graded them quickly enough to make immediate decisions about promotion and graduation. Certainly this can be done for elementary and middle school students as well.

What is the payoff? A de facto extension of the school year. By testing so early, we are truncating the already too-short instructional year. The most successful school systems abroad routinely schedule school years that can be as long as 220 days, as opposed to our 180-day calendar. The cost of making the most of the current school year is next to nothing. This is the kind of common-sense efficiency that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity ignores, and one would have hoped our businessman-turned-mayor would have figured out by now.

The most frequent criticism one hears about testing is that too much classroom time is wasted by “teaching to the test.” I agree. If we were teaching our children correctly, there would be no need to teach to the test.

That is also the conclusion of Roger Shattuck, a retired college professor in Vermont who learned some lessons about the state of American education by serving on his local district school board. In an essay in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Mr. Shattuck recounts how the way students are taught has resulted in a virtually content-free curriculum. In his district in Vermont, children are taught using the same “progressive” constructivist methodologies we have so aggressively adopted here in Gotham. We have replaced specific rigorous curriculum by fuzzy “standards.”

Because children are expected to “construct” their own knowledge, more often than not the result of their labors is a flimsy academic structure indeed.

So Mr. Shattuck comes to the following important conclusion. “The reason for teaching to the test is not the mandated existence of tests. It is the lamentable absence of a clear curriculum. If there’s no coherent curriculum to teach to and to base tests on, then one has to teach to the test. Here lies the great pedagogical short-circuit and break-down, brought on by the empty promises and dummy documents called ‘standards.’ Without a specific curriculum, there can be no standards.” The italics are his.

If the thrust of reform of mayoral control returns to what Mayor Bloomberg promised when seeking that control, that is going “back to basics,” and the full power of technology was harnessed to measure that progress and to make the most of the school year taxpayers already are paying for, we can achieve the real reform that our children so desperately need.