National Education Standards
Public education is
traditionally a state and local responsibility in the United States. Yet many
people feel that poor public schools are a national problem. President Bush
proposed national standards for primary and secondary education, and so has
President Clinton. Yet many ardent supporters of national standards under Bush,
such as former Education Secretary Bill Bennett and former Humanities Endowment
Chairman Lynn Cheney, are leading the opposition under Clinton. What
changed?
Last January, Clinton
ordered the Department of Education to prepare exams to test fourth-grade
reading and eighth-grade math. These are the first nationwide tests
designed to compare student performance across states and school districts.
Participation by school districts is voluntary. A bipartisan, independent
federal agency will supervise the drafting and administration of the tests. By
making reliable comparisons possible, the new national tests are supposed to
create healthy competition among schools, giving them an incentive to
improve.
The
Senate has approved the spending of federal money for this purpose, but the
House voted last month to prohibit it. Clinton says he will veto
the entire Education Department appropriation if a House-Senate conference
committee sustains the ban.
Three camps oppose the bill . One, including
Bush/Reagan education officials Bennett, Diane Ravitch, and Chester Finn,
supports the idea of testing but opposes Clinton's version. Finn and Bennett
consider testing a necessary precondition for school vouchers--a favorite
conservative remedy that would allow parents to choose among schools. Without
reliable testing, they believe, parents cannot be good "consumers."
But this group says that
Clinton has politicized the test, caving in to left-wing pressure
groups . Although the test is being drafted by independent contractors such
as the Educational Testing Service, these critics see the hand of liberal
Department of Education administrators. Early versions, they say, reward
left-wing pedagogical approaches like "new math," which, they say, wrongly
de-emphasize old-fashioned computation. They complain that the fourth-grade
math test can be taken in Spanish.
The Bush
administration's plan was more comprehensive. Education Secretary Lamar
Alexander proposed to test fourth graders, eighth graders, and 12 th
graders in five different subjects, including American history. (Designers of
the Clinton plan limited testing to reading and math, avoiding sensitive
subjects like history in the hope of avoiding arguments over politicization.)
The Bush proposal, which was never prepared as legislation, would also have
created a bipartisan, independent agency to draft the tests. Although Clinton
recently modified his proposal to give control to an independent board, he
allowed the Department of Education to participate in the early stages
of test preparation. When so charged, the Clinton people retort that the
independent board will have ample opportunity to amend the tests if they are
too easy or ideologically skewed.
Asecond camp of conservative opponents,
including House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the religious right, dislikes any
version of national testing . This group believes that the standards are a
way for liberals to establish a national curriculum and usurp local control of
schools. At the very least, they say, schools are forced to tailor curricula to
the test. They believe that all attempts at establishing national curricula
will be riddled with ideology and partisan politics, and cite the controversial
history-curricula guidelines drafted by the Department of Education two years
ago.
The third
category of opponents comprises liberals, including members of the
Congressional Black Caucus, who argue that low test scores stigmatize
minority students as "inferior," when in fact poor schooling and other
disadvantages are to blame for their performance. The test scores, they say,
will be used as an excuse to pour resources into a few select schools, harming
the kids left behind.
However, many liberals who opposed the Bush testing plan
have thrown their support behind Clinton's initiative. For instance, the
National Education Association --the largest and most powerful teachers'
union--long opposed testing, fearing that teachers whose students performed
poorly would lose their jobs. But the NEA has now given Clinton's plan at least
nominal support.
Only six states and
15 big-city school districts have agreed to give the test. The reason
for their reluctance: A national test could be embarrassing and disprove claims
of improvement based on other, less-than-neutral testing regimes. For instance,
Colorado school administrators like to brag that their state's average SAT
score is the highest in the country. However, most college-bound Colorado
students take a different college entrance exam, making the SAT an unreliable
measure of school quality.
