Bush Eases His Position on School Accountability Issue

Risking conflict with conservatives, President Bush on Wednesday urged Congress to maintain rigorous national school accountability standards as it completes work on the long-delayed education reform bill.

In a speech to the National Urban League, Bush sought to establish a middle ground between education groups that fear the federal legislation would label too many schools as failures and reformers who are worried that the bill won’t provide enough spur for improvement.

The president sketched out a system that would require schools across America to steadily improve the performance of students from all racial and ethnic groups but at a pace the administration argues is more practical--particularly for big urban districts like Los Angeles--than some lawmakers seek.

“The bar for adequate school performance must be rigorous, achievable, targeted to all groups and raised gradually,” Bush declared. “I appreciate aiming high, but setting impossible expectations means setting no expectations.”

With his proposals on accountability--and related issues of student testing--Bush reinserted himself as a central player on legislation he once labeled his top domestic priority.

“Bush has been quiet for a long time on education,” said Amy Wilkins, a principal partner at the Education Trust, a school reform advocacy group. “What he did today was come back out and plant the flag with reformers. It looks like he is standing firm.”

Yet in the process, Bush may have exacerbated his tensions with some Republican conservatives--many of whom assert that the education bill already would interject Washington too deeply into traditionally local decisions.

“All the compromises the president advocated . . . are ones that within the House Republican conference will create more problems rather than moving us closer together,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), a leader among the bill’s conservative critics.

Both the House and Senate passed versions of Bush’s education reform initiative earlier this year. But the conference committee now working to fashion a final bill has moved slowly. Bush, in his Wednesday remarks, expressed frustration at the pace and invited the conferees to meet with him today.

The knottiest disputes facing the conference revolve around the issues Bush discussed in his speech: how to design a new system for annually testing students in reading and math, and how to determine which schools are making sufficient progress in improving the performance of their students on those exams.

Each of those issues has generated sustained conflict between two contrasting alliances. On one side, conservative Republicans, governors and most professional education groups have generally sought to minimize federal involvement in local education decisions; on the other side, reformers in both parties have advocated an aggressive role for Washington in leveraging local change and toughening accountability.

Rhetorically, Bush has always aligned with the advocates of local control; in his speech, he insisted again, “Local folks must be in charge of local schools because they’re closest to the children and their challenges.”

But, in practice, Bush has proposed a more assertive role for Washington than many conservatives and governors prefer. That pattern continued on the three key issues Bush tackled Wednesday.

On the question of the tests that would be used to measure student performance, both the House and Senate accepted Bush’s proposal that states be required to annually administer these exams on reading and math from third through eighth grades.

But under pressure from governors and conservative Republicans, the administration reluctantly accepted language that would allow states to meet that requirement with different tests each year or even different tests in different parts of the state in the same year.

State officials insist they need that flexibility to keep down costs and preserve local control. But critics argue that approach would produce a babel of results and undermine Bush’s goal of providing parents clear indicators of school performance.

On Wednesday, Bush said states should maintain flexibility to choose their tests but signaled that he will seek to limit the permissible variation in the exams. “There has to be a way to compare the results of those tests to one another,” he said. “[Otherwise] parents won’t really know who is making progress and who is falling behind.”

Bush also leaned toward reformers rather than House conservatives on a related testing issue. Trying to discourage states from “dumbing down” their tests, the Senate insisted that Washington consider how states perform against a single national benchmark: the voluntary National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. Fearing excessive federal intrusion, the House gave states more leeway to measure themselves against other tests.

Without explicitly endorsing the Senate position, Bush indicated a strong preference that the NAEP test, which is given to a statistical sample of students in most states, be used as an audit of the state test results. “We must have independent evidence that state tests are rigorous and state tests are real,” Bush said.

Bush’s positions on both issues drew praise from such reform advocates as Wilkins and Rep. George Miller of Martinez, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. “If we allow a jumble of tests within a state, we will never achieve our goal of knowing how each child is doing,” Miller said.

But Hoekstra warned that Bush’s apparent support for the NAEP exam as a single national benchmark promised more conflict with congressional conservatives. “Our perspective is once you’ve settled on NAEP, we will evolve into a national test; there will be no local or state flexibility anymore,” Hoekstra said.

The third issue Bush addressed has proved to be perhaps the most complex in the bill: how to determine which schools are making adequate progress in improving student performance. That question has significant consequences because many of the bill’s key provisions, such as mandated state efforts to restructure the school, only affect those judged to be failing.

In his speech, Bush explained only in general terms his plan to break the deadlock involving the House, the Senate and professional education groups over how to identify failing schools. But on Capitol Hill, his aides have begun to discuss a detailed proposal modeled on the accountability system used in Texas.

Under the plan, schools would be judged to be making sufficient progress if a fixed portion of students--probably half at first--in every racial and ethnic group passed the new tests, according to administration sources. Every few years, that bar would be raised so that a higher percentage of students must pass the test; the ultimate goal is to require that all, or virtually all, students pass the test in 15 years.

Schools that fail to reach the bar would have to significantly reduce the share of students who fail the test each year. Those that don’t reduce the share of students flunking the test quickly enough--possibly at a rate of 10% annually--would be labeled as failing schools, according to the administration plan.

Bush aides portray this approach as a means to maintain pressure on schools while responding to the fears of big-city superintendents such as Roy Romer in Los Angeles, who argue the federal bill could dilute reform efforts by labeling too many schools as failures. Bush gestured toward those concerns Wednesday when he said, “If we identify all schools as failures, we won’t be able to focus on the greatest needs.” But earlier in his speech, he pointedly insisted that Washington cannot simply accept the status quo: “The failure of many urban schools is a great and continuing scandal.”

In an interview, Romer said the new system the administration is discussing appears to offer a “fair approach” toward identifying which schools are making adequate progress. But he warned that expecting virtually every student to ultimately pass the new exams could backfire by encouraging states to lower standards.