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August 16, 2007

National Standards: A Hopeless Cause

In yesterday’s Washington Times, Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, declared that it’s high time America had national science standards. “With the No Child Left Behind Act up for renewal,” he wrote, “an essential next step is clear….Revise NCLB to set voluntary nationwide education standards.” But is having national standards really the clear next step toward educational excellence? Not if history or current events has anything to say about it.

Consider recent history. Anyone remember the voluntary national standards debacle of the mid-1990s? You know, when the standards went nowhere politically but created a huge, nationwide controversy? What happened there?

It turns out, Americans are extremely diverse, and not just in terms of ethnicity, religion, or race. We also hold very strong and divergent opinions concerning both what to teach and how to teach our children, even in subjects such as mathematics that nationalizers insist should be the same everywhere and for all people. The result in the mid-1990s was that no one could agree on common standards, and none were implemented.

But what if we could somehow forge a consensus around powerful, rigorous standards that really would challenge our students and schools? Then wouldn’t improvement be guaranteed?

Here’s where current events – in particular, implementation of NCLB – are instructive.

NCLB supporters loudly promise excellence, just as national standards champions would were their policies enacted. But something has fallen apart between NCLB’s promise and reality: It seems that the only way the law is going to accomplish its 100 percent proficiency goal is by states making “proficient” synonymous with, well, “there’s no way that’s proficient!” As the Institute of Education Sciences recently found, not only have most states set their proficiency levels below the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s proficiency threshold, many have actually set them below NAEP’s basic level!

Ah, but isn’t keeping states from weaseling out of real accountability exactly why we need national standards?

In theory, yes, but even if we pass rigorous national standards, they would have to be enforced, and enforcement is something Washington has never done effectively. When push has come to shove, no administration has ever been willing to really “get tough” with the state leaders, education bureaucrats, teacher unions, and other powerful interests who don’t want to be held to high – and difficult to attain – standards.

Heck, the Bush administration is about as dedicated to NCLB as any group can be, but even Secretary Spellings dodges real enforcement of the law. States have been sabotaging NCLB’s school choice, persistently dangerous schools, and other accountability provisions since day one, and yet Spellings declared in a Newshour report just this Tuesday that she chooses “to believe that the people in states are working hard to improve education for their kids. Have we made progress? Have we raised the level of intensity, and the level of rigor, and the level of anxiety for grownups to respond to kids? You bet we have.”

Lest you think this is just a Republican trying to defend her president’s signature domestic accomplishment, recall that NCLB’s predecessor, the Improving America’s Schools Act, was overseen by a Democrat and totally ignored by numerous states. A paralyzing fear of special interests is truly bipartisan. Indeed, the entire forty-plus year history of federal involvement in education has been defined by abundant federal cash, lots of lofty promises, and almost nothing by way of accountability or educational success.

Now, if we were somehow able to enact and enforce rigorous national standards there would still be huge problems – such standards would only make our competition and innovation problems even worse, for instance – but those aren’t issues we even need to address right now. Why? Because as both history and current events make clear, rigorous national standards, at least through Washington, will never, ever, come to be.
 

Neal McCluskey is a policy analyst with Cato's Center for Educational Freedom. Prior to arriving at Cato, McCluskey served in the U.S. Army, taught high school English, and was a freelance reporter covering municipal government and education in suburban New Jersey. Mr. McCluskey is the author of Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education.

 

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