The Crusade for National Curricula, Tests Rests on Bogus Assumptions

How can anyone oppose President Bill Clinton’s call for national academic standards and for testing all children in reading and math? Disappointing scores on recent national and international tests bolster his challenge. Corporate leaders and governors preach the gospel of standards and tests. Moreover, more than 90% of Americans have told pollsters they like this prescription for ailing public schools. The crusade for centralizing curriculum in a country with a 150-year history of decentralized public schooling is both remarkable and, apparently, unstoppable.

To be sure, some governors, many small-town officials, occasional academics and parents have expressed fear that national standards and tests--even “voluntary” ones--will reduce what little power they already have to conduct community business. But their voice has steadily weakened in the face of the bipartisan crusade to create national standards and tests.

This campaign rests on two assumptions. First, public schools’ productivity, as measured by test scores, will spur the larger economy. Second, poor U.S. student performance on international tests results from a lack of national standards and tests. Both assumptions are false.

Since the early 1980s, corporate and public officials, aided by stories in the media, have spliced together declining U.S. productivity and falling standardized-test scores in public schools. They have pointed to Japan’s and Germany’s schooling as the model. If, as Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley said, “Education is the engine that drives our economy,” national standards and tests--as in Japan--would prod students, parents and teachers to work harder.

Yet, consider what has occurred in the 1990s. National productivity has risen. The U.S. economy has outperformed both Germany’s and Japan’s. Unemployment and inflation are lower than in the early 1980s. But no awards have been handed out to public schools. Media reporting and public officials’ announcements continue to report and interpret test scores as reflecting students’ failure to measure up to 21st-century workplace needs. Thus is revealed the sham of linking economic productivity and students’ test scores.

Nonetheless, blaming a declining economy on failing public schools was shrewd politics. Americans do believe that education and individual gains are strongly linked; personal income and years of education are highly correlated. But it is not the individual link between education and the larger economy that presidents, governors and corporate leaders have crusaded for since the early ‘80s; rather, it is the connection between students’ test performance and the overall economy. While such a connection goes largely unquestioned, it is, nonetheless, a myth.

The bogus connection between public schools and economic conditions becomes glaring when the spotlight shifts from public schools to university research. Century-old ties between federal and corporate funding of university scientists--seldom noted in the media yet richly documented--have led to the development of commercial products, medical advances and defense technology. Such contracts starkly reveal how critical university research has been to the larger economy and how phony it is to connect students’ test scores to lowered economic productivity.

From 1958-1968, federal funding of scientific research in universities grew from $254 million to $1.57 billion, or an increase of 523% (controlling for inflation). When these federal research contracts are calculated on a per-professor basis, the results are staggering. For private universities, the median annual per-professor federal grant in the late 1980s was just over $107,000; for public universities, it was a tad above $64,000. Corporate and foundation research contracts add another 15% to these figures.

This linkage between university research and expected national economic returns needs no myth-making. Public and private funding produced inventions and corporate profits. The sham of blaming public schools for the ebb and flow of national economic productivity may be politically smart and a low-cost strategy of exploiting a vulnerable institution, but it rests on counterfeit assumptions.

The flawed assumption that U.S. students do less well on international tests because we lack national curriculum standards and tests shows up most clearly in the recent reporting of the Third International Math and Science Study for 7th and 8th graders.

As widely reported, U.S. students scored below many of their foreign counterparts in math and were average in science. Japanese and French students, for example, whose countries have national ministries and centrally driven standards and tests, scored significantly higher in math than their U.S. counterparts. In science, students from Japan, Singapore and Korea--the latter two nations also with national curricula and tests--substantially outscored U.S. 13-year-olds.

Few pundits, however, noted the contradictions that seriously undercut the argument for national academic standards and tests. Other countries with national curricula and tests--England, Norway, Israel and Spain--ranked the same as the United States in math. Further complicating the math picture is that 13-year-olds from Switzerland, Australia and Canada, who come from decentralized systems of schooling much like the U.S.’, also scored significantly higher than students from countries with ministry-driven curricula.

When science scores are examined, similar contradictions arise. Japan’s students outscored America’s in science, but France’s and Spain’s, which have heavily centralized curricula, fell significantly below students in the United States. Moreover, students from New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland--all lacking national curricula and tests--did just as well as students from countries with strong national direction for local schools. Furthermore, on some science topics, U.S. students did as well or better than Japanese, Norwegian and French students--even those from Hong Kong.

Beneath the headlines of U.S. students’ supposedly mediocre performance on international tests is far more contrary than supporting evidence for the president’s national curricular standards and tests. Nevertheless, a politically clever and feel-good crusade has sprung up to bring them about. Meanwhile, larger education issues that seriously undermine the nation’s public schools--such as severe inequalities in funding and quality of schooling for the nation’s poor in rural and big-city districts--go unaddressed.