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Time to try a national test for schools

Friday, February 16 at 12:01 AM

By William J. Moloney

Nearly a quarter-century past the florid but accurate rhetoric of the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation At Risk report — “rising tide of mediocrity,” etc. — the United States is still floundering about in the great enterprise of fixing its schools. Since those with real authority, i.e., elected officials, tend to come and go, no one is compelled to be accountable for the “big picture,” which is that despite decades of very expensive effort the overall condition of U.S. education has failed to improve, and for children of poverty and color the situation has gotten significantly worse.

This grim reality should be kept in mind as the new 110th Congress tries to fix the most sweeping education reform initiative in the nation’s history, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The good news about No Child Left Behind is that its core purpose of lifting up all children — particularly those that have been historically neglected — is nothing less than a high moral imperative for our country. NCLB’s aggressive insistence on attention to those groups “left behind” has been its best feature, and one that has shown results in many settings. The bad news is that this narrow but splendid purpose has been entombed in a law that has become a bureaucratic nightmare in all 50 states. The calamities of NCLB implementation are directly traceable to the contradictory political compromises that were written into the law in order to assure its passage.

Among these many self-defeating compromises, none would prove more devastating than NCLB’s approach to testing. In the law’s original draft, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was to provide a uniform benchmark for the entire country to measure success in the law’s implementation. Very quickly, however, this idea for a national test fell victim to the historic prejudices of the two political parties. “National” was offensive to Republicans and “test” to Democrats.

Replacing the “national test” was the politically palatable but patently absurd idea of allowing every state to not only have its own test but also invent its own approach to scoring. As documented by several recent studies this led directly to stunning inconsistency among state tests and rampant “gaming” of progress reports. Worse, these highly visible flaws provided plentiful ammunition to those NCLB critics whose main goal was derailing anything that might lead to real accountability.

Turning our back on a national test was a tragedy on several fronts. First, it deprived the nation of the one tool that could have given Americans a comprehensive and honest picture of the condition of U.S. education — an absolutely necessary precondition to mobilizing the country for action.

Second, it deprived the states of a superb instrument for planning, measuring and defending their individual strategies for reform. Instead, they are left vulnerable to their own confusions and critics and utterly unable to tell their citizens how well their state is performing compared to the rest of the country.

Third, the absence of a national benchmark compelled the U.S. Department of Education to create a vast, complex, intrusive and ultimately unworkable bureaucratic system of scorekeeping simply to compensate for the lack of such a standard.

So, how do we rid ourselves of the bureaucratic excesses, while preserving the real successes and the moral high ground of NCLB? Hopefully the equally mighty exertions and frustrations of five years of NCLB have opened our eyes to where we went wrong and prepared us to recognize that a respected national measure of educational progress is the indispensable ingredient for a renaissance in America’s schools. Surely we can accept that our cherished principles of federalism and local control which have been undamaged by our national systems of currency, weights and measures, railway gauges, etc., will not be injured by a comparable system of measuring educational attainment. Such a national standard would be far more valuable and far less intrusive than the federal burdens we bear today.

Many of our international economic competitors do this routinely. Why not America?

William J. Moloney is Colorado commissioner of education.

READER COMMENTS

Commissioner Maloney is correct. We are the only country without national tests, and we are the worst performing in the world. That is not coincidence.
That national test, and toay's CSAP should be used with consequences for the students, not just the teachers and building. Proficiency in all subjects at grade level should be required for playing sports, etc.
Tests should be administered by a seperate group of people, not teachers, principals or board members. They should not ever see test items and thus teach to broader standards and not to the test items.

Posted by Ed Lyell on February 22, 2007 08:31 AM

Good post. A national test is greatly needed. But the liberals in Colorado keep fighting against testing. After all, if you give them a test you will find out how little the students have learned. It is best that they learn to fight the government and have music, sports, arts, and culture. What do you need the basics for? It is time for everyone to strart backing education for the 3Rs first and then you can include the extas. But test to find out if the student can pass the 3R's first.

Posted by duke on February 17, 2007 04:30 PM