Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
YES, TO NATIONAL TESTS
By Diane Ravitch
Forbes, May 5, 1997
President Clinton wants local school districts and states to accept national education standards. He has offered to make available exemplary national tests of student achievement in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics.
Critics are already lined up to attack national testing, from Phyllis Schlafly on the right, who fears a federal takeover, to an organization on the left called Fairtest, which has never met a test it considers fair. Lynne V. Cheney, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has warned against the scheme, on the grounds that loopy pedagogical leftists are sure to take it over.
But national testing is a good idea with bipartisan origins. In 1991 President Bush and his education secretary, Lamar Alexander, proposed national tests, but a Democrat-led Congress and prominent educators scorned the idea. The Democrats claimed that tests discriminate against minorities and, in the metaphor of the day, "weighing a sheep won't make it grow."
In a classic Nixon-to-China move, Clinton now recommends a strategy that Democrats and educators would not tolerate from a Republican President. The ingenious part of the Clinton plan is that it requires no new standards: It utilizes excellent existing tests that already incorporate high standards.
Under the proposal, states and school districts would be permitted, but not required, to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to test the reading skills of fourth-graders, and the mathematics portion of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for eighth-graders.
The cost of the first testing, in 1999, would be borne by the federal government. After that, districts or states would pay if they wanted to use the tests again.
For nearly three decades NAEP has been administered only to national or state samples. TIMSS was recently given to half a million children in 41 countries: U.S. students placed 28th of the 41 in math. The new national tests would generate scores for individual students. For the first time ever, American students (and their parents and teachers) would find out how they are doing in comparison with national and international benchmarks.
Many parents and teachers will be shocked when they see how much worse youngsters do on these new tests than on current state and local tests. Both new tests are based on standards far higher than most states now use. In Wisconsin, 88% of students met the state's reading standard, but only 35% reached NAEP's fourth-grade standard. South Carolina reported that 82% were doing fine, but only 20% met NAEP's standard. In Louisiana 80% of the seventh-graders passed the seventh-grade state test in math, but only 10% performed well on NAEP. In Oklahoma, there was a 50-point gap between the pass rates on the state and national standards. These tests seem designed to boost students' self-esteem rather than to measure their performance.
Only Delaware, Kentucky and New Hampshire seem to have state standards as high as the current NAEP standards in reading and mathematics.
However unsettling the test results might be, they could serve as a powerful stimulus for educational reform.
There are two serious flaws with the Administration's plan. First, this national testing program should be promptly removed from the Department of Education, where it is subject to manipulation by political appointees and interest groups (if it is not removed, Cheney's warning may be prescient). It should be assigned to a bipartisan autonomous agency committed to high standards and honest reporting. Such an agency already exists: the National Assessment Governing Board, which has administered the current national assessments for years.
A second serious flaw is that the Administration plans to give the eighth-grade mathematics test in Spanish, which is a terrible idea. Students in American schools must learn to function in the larger society, which requires knowledge of the English language.
If it is fixed, the Administration's plan will give an honest accounting of how well students are learning -- as well as a big boost to those parents and teachers who demand improved student performance.
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Diane Ravitch is a historian and a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City.