As horror stories emerge from the standards movement, usually involving testing, there is a natural impulse just to abolish tests. No tests, no horror stories, right? The trouble with this as a solution is that without tests, it’s impossible to tell whether kids are learning in school. It is possible, in a rarefied little corner of America where a lot of the national leadership lives, to believe that public education has become an iffy proposition –that public schools in this country are teetering on the brink of a general system failure. From that vantage point, the standards movement looks like a less big deal than it is. That’s why so much of the national education debate is about vouchers, which 64,000 children currently have. But for now, what goes on in public schools is a thousand times more important, almost literally, than the battle over vouchers. Fifty-five million children go to public elementary and secondary schools. As an absolute number, and as a percentage of schoolchildren, public-school attendance is the highest it has ever been, and growing rapidly. If you count teachers and administrators, more than a fifth of the population of the country can be found, every weekday at 9, sitting under the roof of a public school. Nearly 50 years ago, in his magnificent decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared public education to be perhaps the single most important function of government in the United States –and he wrote that at a time when barely half of our teenagers were graduating from high school. What Warren said then is still true, only you can take out the “perhaps.”
That is why the nationwide movement for educational standards and accountability is arguably the most significant domestic government intervention since the New Deal. Its importance is easy to underestimate, because the driving force behind the standards movement is not the education establishment itself but a diffuse group of parents, business interests and state bureaucrats. Still, it’s impossible to think of another initiative that affects as many people.
We ought to realize that something historic –a giant government program that has sneaked up on us, because it wasn’t planned from the top down –is underway, and then to make sure it’s done right rather than turning against all standardized tests. Doing it right means using good tests, making sure they are administered under fair, secure conditions and making sure they are used as much as possible to encourage students and teachers to do better and as little as possible simply to punish them. But what it mainly means is that we have to decide what we want our students to learn. Tests tailored to a curriculum are almost always better than tests that land unexpectedly in a classroom like a UFO. Conversely, tests that aren’t related to the material taught in the classroom are usually adopted because it’s too hard to get control over the curriculum or because the real purpose is to test aptitude (rather than achievement) –and the noncurricular tests generate the most egregious classroom test prepping.
Why don’t we have such tests? Mostly because we believe that local control of public education is one of our sacred first principles. What people don’t realize is that we already have, in effect, national educational standards. The private national textbook and test publishers set them. Education just doesn’t differ very much from state to state, because it’s based on materials purchased from a handful of national companies. We’d be far better off admitting what’s going on, and doing it right, and democratically, than letting it continue to happen in the current sloppy fashion. The journey to national standards is going to be awfully bumpy, but please, let’s not take the bumps as a sign that it’s not worth making.
