Allies Are Forcing Bush to Bend on School Testing

Under pressure from some of his closest allies, President Bush is privately making concessions that could weaken the centerpiece of his education reform plan: the requirement that states stiffen their systems for measuring student performance.

As a result, some education reformers fear that the Bush plan--which faces its first legislative review today--may not prompt improvements in local schools that are nearly as sweeping as the president seeks.

In their resistance to Bush’s initiative, conservative lawmakers and governors in both parties are exploiting a conflict between the president’s agenda and the rhetoric he has used to describe it. While Bush portrays his education plan as promoting “local control,” it contains a considerable element of federal direction--if not coercion.

Now, critics are turning the local control argument against Bush’s proposal that Washington require states to measure student achievement in reading and math with a more uniform annual testing system.

“I am not in the business of the federal government coming in and mandating these kinds of activities to my state or my local school district, and I want a maximum amount of flexibility for them,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who chairs a subcommittee of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

In the name of local autonomy, such critics are demanding that Bush give states the freedom to use different tests in different grades--or even different tests for students in the same grade--to the point where it may be difficult to meet Bush’s goal of providing parents clear assessments of whether schools are making progress.

Indeed, while the opposition among Democrats to school vouchers has drawn more attention, the largely Republican resistance to Bush’s testing approach could determine, to a far greater degree, whether the plan ultimately accomplishes significant change in the classroom. The worry among education reformers is that Bush will dilute his proposals to where they would do little more than codify the hodgepodge of testing schemes that states now utilize.

“What’s going on is that states don’t want to change what they are currently doing,” said Checker E. Finn, a leading GOP education analyst. “This is a way of saying, ‘We’re nice, we’re with you,’ without altering their present practices.”

Bruce Reed, former President Clinton’s top domestic policy advisor, said that allowing states to evade uniform tests would leave Bush’s plan with little hope of promoting meaningful change. “Letting some states measure their kids in inches and others measure their kids under the metric system will defeat the whole purpose,” said Reed, now president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

The Senate Education Committee begins its debate on the bill today. But education experts in both parties believe the real fights--not only on testing, but also on other disputed issues--will come later this month on the Senate floor.

Bush Plan Shows Traces of Clinton’s

The battle over Bush’s testing proposal echoes the Clinton administration’s struggle over its effort to establish voluntary national tests in reading and math. Clinton believed that providing such a common benchmark would create pressure on states to improve student performance, but the idea died amid intense resistance from congressional conservatives who viewed it as a threat to local curriculum control.

Sharing that sentiment, Bush hasn’t proposed that Washington establish new national tests. But he shares Clinton’s belief that better measurement will provide pressure for improvement; during the campaign, Bush repeatedly insisted that states be required to test every student in reading and math in grades three through eight.

Bush said he would give states flexibility to design their own tests. But he insisted the exams had to provide enough information to allow parents and officials to determine whether schools were making progress against clearly defined standards.

“Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning,” Bush declared in a speech to Congress last week.

Now, the question is how much freedom the Bush plan will give states in meeting that requirement to measure. Two distinct issues are generating the conflict. One is how to ensure test results can be compared among states; the other is ensuring that test results can be compared within states.

Though Bush never said so, many reformers presumed that he intended states to devise uniform reading and math tests, tied to their own curriculum, and impose them on all students in the same grade each year. Only seven states now apply such a rigorous testing system, according to the Education Commission of the States.

One White House official closely involved in the negotiations over the bill said the administration’s “standard expectation” is that states would meet the testing requirement with such uniform statewide tests. But under pressure from some governors and congressional conservatives, the White House has already decided not to require that states impose such a comprehensive system.

“We say the states need to put together an assessment program that meets the goal of measuring annual growth in reading and math,” said the senior White House official, who asked not to be identified while discussing congressional negotiations. “The easiest way for states to meet that goal is with . . . a [uniform] statewide test, but we don’t want to tell them to do that.”

The draft legislation that Senate Education Committee Chairman James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) introduced Tuesday--and will be taken up today--tracks the administration approach.

That compromise reflects the pressure from local control advocates to minimize federal direction of the testing process. While accepting Bush’s demand for annual tests, some governors and congressional conservatives have been insisting that states should be free to use different tests in different years--meaning students could take a state-designed test one year, a national standardized exam the next and yet a different test the next.

Governors Push Variety in Testing

Last month, Bush’s former colleagues at the National Governors’ Assn. insisted that states even be allowed to use different tests in different parts of their state in the same grade.

The administration proposal would bend to those concerns; the senior White House official said it would allow such flexibility, as long as the state convinces the federal Education Department that the results of the various tests can be statistically correlated and tied to the state curriculum.

This proposal has largely mollified congressional conservatives. But it has raised red flags among reform advocates. Finn and Reed argue that it is technically impossible to compare results from the different tests, as the administration projects. “It is a myth; it is a fantasy,” Finn insisted.

The second dispute revolves around Bush’s effort to establish a common national yardstick for the state tests. In the campaign, Bush proposed that states should receive bonuses or penalties based on whether students demonstrated improvement on the state tests. But to ensure that states simply didn’t write easy tests to ensure progress, he also proposed that states not be given the bonuses unless students also showed progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a test given to a sampling of students in most states. That approach made the NAEP test the final arbiter of which states would be penalized or rewarded.

But that idea has also drawn fire from some conservatives, who say that it risks converting NAEP into a national test. “The president is suggesting that NAEP be required of all states,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). “We tend to think that is not the best approach.”

Conservatives want the administration to dilute the use of NAEP in apportioning rewards and to allow states to choose other national tests as the yardstick against which to compare their results.