Local Success, Federal Failure
How do your local public schools measure up? It depends on whom you ask
Of course, grades are less important than the content they measure. But critics say the content is also too weak. A 2006 Fordham report grading the quality of the state standards awarded only three states A's; 26 got D's or F's. A major problem highlighted by Fordham: The "experts" drafted to write the standards were not highly educated in their disciplines.
Qualified standards writers can be hard to find-especially for a state on a tight deadline and trim budget. North Dakota had just 10 permanent staffers on standards and testing; on assessments, Montana's education agency had one. "She's the whole department," says Linda McCulloch, the state superintendent.
By contrast, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, regularly revises standards with the help of dozens of experts. "As a [state] commissioner, you're really pretty much restricted to off-the-shelf tests," says Charles Smith, the former Tennessee education commissioner and now NAGB's executive director. There are not many states ... [that] could attract the kind of experts that we're able to attract." If the federal government were in charge, reformers say, states could design better tests and create more rigorous standards, with no additional funding.
This is not the first time national standards have been proposed. President Bill Clinton tried twice-first to draft standards and later to introduce a voluntary national test-but the ideas failed as opponents warned the test would force schools to teach a liberal national agenda condoning homosexuality and encouraging feminism and as states and municipalities resisted the loss of local control.
The double failure made a deep impression on Michael Cohen, a Clinton adviser. "What is conventionally thought of as national standards-that is, the federal government leads, it picks somebody to write them, and it puts it out there for states to use-I'm increasingly unconvinced that that's the way to get there," he says.
Bottom up. Cohen now believes the states must take the initiative. He is president of Achieve, a nonprofit that helps states improve their standards through a process far more intensive than simply accepting a list from the government. Instead, the states hold summits and solicit outside assistance; the proposed standards are then reviewed by an independent panel. Although each state conducts its own review, they tend to reach similar goals. "The real world is the same wherever you are," Cohen says. "So the states, by virtue of trying to create real-world anchors, are discovering their standards ought to be quite similar to each other."
Letting states write their own plans could produce even better results. Cheri Pierson Yecke, Florida's chancellor of K-12 schools, points to a new reading program that some California schools tested in the 1990s. The resulting lower test scores alarmed policymakers, and the program was scrapped. Because the program wasn't a national one, only some students had to suffer its poor results. "That's the beauty of local control," Yecke explains. "[It] gives us 50 different laboratories, so we'll know what we need to discard and what we need to embrace."
National standards would not necessarily disrupt those laboratories. Neither plan before Congress-one from Sen. Christopher Dodd and the other from Sen. Edward Kennedy-would force the states to adopt the standards the federal government would be required to write. But, if history is any guide, backlashes could result from whatever those standards turn out to be.
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