The idea that standardized tests for school kids are "a civil right."

Argued in a WaPo column titled "Is it a student�s civil right to take a federally mandated standardized test?" Excerpt:

[C]ivil rights advocates don�t trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged children if they aren�t required by federal law to test and make public the scores of blacks, Hispanics, students with disabilities and English-language learners....

States and school districts that don�t want to deal with the daunting task of improving the achievement of poor students complain about testing as a way of shirking accountability, Henderson said. �This is a political debate, and opponents will use cracks in the facade as a basis for driving a truck through it,� [said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group of civil rights advocates that includes the NAACP and the National Urban League].

Further down in the column � 15 paragraphs later � there's the news that Henderson gets paid something like $88,250 a year from the Educational Testing Service for sitting on its board of directors.

He said there was no conflict between lobbying for testing and earning income from a testing company. �I wanted to understand how testing is used and the quality of measurements,� Henderson said, explaining why he joined the ETS board about a decade ago. �It�s been a useful grounding in understanding the science of psychonometrics.�

It's also useful to be grounded in understanding the science of bullshit-o-metrics.