This just in: the Keystone Exams are a failed experiment that have cost Pennsylvania taxpayers more than $70 million and nearly a decade’s worth of fruitless development and wasted classroom time.

A pair of bills introduced this week would end or greatly reduce the tests’ role as graduation requirements for high school students in Pennsylvania. That’s a good thing, because lawmakers need to acknowledge that the tests don’t work and abolish them once and for all.

Sadly, that seems less than likely, with the General Assembly poised to either pass the buck to school districts or simply replace the Keystones with yet another standardized test.

One of the bills would allow school districts, not the state, to decide whether to use the exams as a graduation requirement. Another would expand students’ ability to opt out of the tests. A third, being introduced by Senate Education Committee Chairman John Eichelberger Jr., R-30, would abolish the exams entirely and use the SAT to fulfill federal accountability requirements.

Eichelberger has the first part of the equation correct. The Keystones need to go. But it makes no sense to simply replace them with another standardized test.

Let’s be blunt. The problem isn’t the Keystone tests, it’s all standardized tests — which research have shown to be fundamentally flawed as metrics of student performance, growth and achievement. They do nothing to promote or showcase characteristics like curiosity, persistence, collaboration or socialization — all of which are desirable, if not vital, qualities for success in a person’s professional, civic and personal life.

Large-scale standardized tests like the Keystone and SAT aren’t even comprehensive measures of student achievement in the subjects they purport to address. The National Research Council, which conducted a nine-year study on standardized testing, found that the tests yield little in the way of academic progress.

The Keystones in particular are far better at causing harm — undermining student engagement, diverting attention from the arts and humanities, narrowing curriculums and exacerbating the gap between wealthy and poor districts — than they are at enhancing the effectiveness of secondary education in Pennsylvania.

What should enrage parents, teachers and students across the commonwealth is that we already know all of this. Last year Gov. Tom Wolf signed a bill delaying the Keystones’ graduation requirement until the 2018-19 academic year and called on state officials to find a better way to measure student achievement. Now the General Assembly is considering more delays, when what it should be doing is wiping the slate clean and searching for a better way forward.

That will happen only if we acknowledge that forcing students to fill out bubble sheets isn’t an effective way to measure or promote achievement, or ensure teachers are held accountable for the learning that does — or doesn’t — take place in their classrooms.