Governors Agree to Set Higher Goals for Nation’s Schools

Convinced that standards drive excellence, the nation’s governors concluded a national summit on educational reform Wednesday by agreeing to set new, higher academic goals for all elementary and secondary school students within two years.

Joined by President Clinton and 49 corporate chiefs, the 41 state leaders also endorsed the idea of developing rigorous new tests to measure whether students meet the standards. And they agreed to establish an independent, nongovernmental body to review new standards and monitor each state’s progress toward them.

The governors studiously avoided hot-button issues, such as tuition vouchers and merit pay for teachers, preferring to rally around proposals that the summit’s organizers viewed as less divisive but fundamental to lasting reform.

“Until we set standards and learn how to measure against them, [we can’t assess the effectiveness of] all the other ideas that bounce off the walls of the education establishment,” said Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of IBM, which was host of the summit at its Upstate New York conference center. Co-chairman of the meeting was Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson.

Gerstner’s colleagues from blue-chip companies such as Eastman Kodak and DuPont pledged to support the governors by changing hiring practices within one year to require academic transcripts, portfolios or certificates of mastery from new high school graduates seeking jobs.

The governors stressed that standards should be set by the states or by local districts and not by national groups, such as the English teachers who recently unveiled standards for reading and writing that were panned as too vague and politically correct, or the UCLA National Center for History in the Schools, which produced history standards widely attacked for slighting George Washington and traditional views of American progress.

President Clinton, who as Arkansas governor was one of the organizers of the last summit, acknowledged the failures of some of the national efforts in his speech to the group.

“I accept your premise,” he said told them. “We can only do better with tougher standards and better assessment--and you should set the standards. I believe that is absolutely right. And that will be the lasting legacy of this conference.”

While acknowledging that the federal government has little money to improve American schools, the president told the governors and executives that they “must have an assessment system with consequences. . . . Being promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in Pasadena, Calif., as it does in Palisades, N.Y. The worst thing you can do is to send people all the way through school with a diploma they can’t read.”

However, some of the 30 educators, legislators and policy experts who attended the New York summit as observers doubted the wisdom of leaving the critical job of setting standards to the states.

Just because standards may be produced locally “doesn’t mean [they’re] good,” said Chester Finn, a former education advisor in the Bush administration and now a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “A lot of states have done dumb standards.”

A survey by the American Federation of Teachers found that only 13 states have written standards in the core academic subjects that were clear and specific enough to guide course content at each grade level.

Other summit watchers worried about the ramifications of requiring new high school graduates to present academic transcripts when they apply for a job.

Although he pronounced the summit “outstanding,” Albert Shanker, president of the teachers federation, said the transcript requirement could raise concerns if it means that poor, minority youths from substandard schools don’t get hired.

“Here is where good education policy . . . is going to run counter to civil rights policy,” the union chief said. “Suppose it results in disparate impacts?”

Shanker noted that transcripts have little meaning because they are based on grading systems that vary tremendously from school to school. He said the summit ought to provoke more discussion about how to turn transcripts into a “common currency” that employers can use no matter where in the country a job applicant is from. Shanker said he supports the basic purpose of the requirement--giving youths a strong incentive to work hard in school.

The other major question left open by the summit is the nature of the independent entity called for to assess states’ progress toward setting higher standards.

The governors and business leaders proclaimed it an essential part of their strategy, since the proposed mechanism would allow states to be compared and held accountable for improving educational quality.

But who would constitute it and how it would be funded remain unsettled. Summit observers said that how to pay for the governors’ reforms was a point of discomfort for many participants.

Developing a reliable test that is keyed to the new standards is expensive, said Frank Newman, director of the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan group that advises states on education policy. California’s controversial CLAS test cost about $26 million.

Business leaders such as Gerstner said public education does not need a huge infusion of new dollars overall but should find ways to reallocate what it spends so that more money goes directly into the classroom, not to administration or other overhead expenses.

Times staff writer John Broder contributed to this story.