House Endorses Plan to Expand School Testing

The House on Tuesday endorsed a major expansion of federal testing requirements for elementary and middle schools, a step advocates call crucial to tracking the progress of students and achieving education reform.

On a 255-173 vote, the House defeated an effort to kill a proposal in a White House-backed education bill to require annual reading and mathematics tests for students in grades three through eight.

The testing requirement is viewed as a cornerstone of the bill, and the House vote may have been the provision’s last critical hurdle. The requirement appears to hold majority support in the Senate, which is considering its own version of an education reform bill.

Both versions promise more federal funding in exchange for state-led efforts to leverage better academic results out of mediocre or failing schools.

Approval of the overall bill in the House could come as early as today. Still pending is a fight over providing federal funds for private school tuition--a proposal by President Bush that has been omitted from the legislation. Conservative Republicans plan to push for amendments to authorize such voucher payments, but their chances of passage are unclear in the House and all but nil in the Senate. The testing requirement is seen as key to the effort to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in new aid to struggling schools and to apply sanctions to those that fail to improve. Without annual assessments, advocates say, parents and educators have no way of knowing how many kids are falling behind and which schools need help.

“It’s time to take our heads out of the sand and quit ignoring incompetence, and quit ignoring that some of our kids--too many of them--aren’t learning,” said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the leading House proponent of the Bush legislation.

No one disputes that the new proposal would accelerate the national drive for more tests. Only 15 states, including California and Texas, now test schoolchildren as often as the bill would require, according to the Education Commission of the States. An additional 16 test in at least three grades between third and eighth. The remaining 19 test in two or fewer.

But an unusual coalition of conservatives and liberals said the new requirement would only foist another unfunded mandate onto state and local school systems that aren’t equipped to handle it.

This group, led by Reps. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.), proposed an amendment to maintain the testing status quo. Under current law, enacted in 1994, states are required to test students once in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school.

Those tests are supposed to be in sync with state-developed content standards in reading, language and mathematics--a standard that some states have had trouble meeting.

Conservatives, many of whom are hostile to a bill that fails to include vouchers, argued that federally imposed testing rules intrude too much on state and local authority.

In fact, Hoekstra expressed astonishment that the GOP-led House was going along with a testing program that he believed is more expansive than a voluntary national testing system proposed in 1997 by President Clinton for reading tests in fourth grade and math tests in eighth grade. Congressional Republicans killed that idea.

Now many of them are on board with the Bush testing plan. Of 221 House Republicans, 166 sided with the president to defeat the Hoekstra-Frank amendment--including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and his deputies.

“Whoa! How did that happen?” Hoekstra asked reporters afterward.

Backers of the Bush plan reply that they are not seeking a new national test but rather 50 state-designed accountability systems monitored by the federal government.

Liberals, meanwhile, complained that testing is not an end in itself. Of the 210 House Democrats, 119 voted for the amendment to strike the testing provision--including the party’s leadership.

“Remember the farmer’s adage: You do not fatten the pig merely by weighing the pig,” said Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.). “You do not improve education merely by giving tests.”

Critics also contended that the requirement could overload a testing industry that is barely keeping pace with current demand. In the race to develop accountability systems, many states and school systems have run up against testing glitches and breakdowns.

The legislation, which would reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act for the first time in seven years, would give states three years to implement the new tests and would authorize new federal aid to help pay for them.

Exactly which tests would be given and how they would be monitored is another crucial issue. Many proponents of school standards and accountability say lawmakers need to strengthen the testing program when legislation reaches a House-Senate conference. The Senate version, for instance, would require states to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress to help double-check results from state-chosen exams; the House version would not.

Another flash point is the degree of flexibility that states and local officials would be given with federal funds. Republicans want to cut red tape.

In negotiations with the White House and the GOP, leading Democrats have given their grudging assent to that idea, as long as money is not taken away from schools in the most impoverished neighborhoods. On Tuesday, the House voted, 217 to 209, for a pilot project to give two districts in each state virtual freedom to spend federal aid as they wish. Nearly all Republicans supported the measure and nearly all Democrats opposed it.

The roll call on testing split both parties, as reflected in the votes of the 51-member California delegation. Among the state’s 20 Republicans, two voted against the president’s testing proposal: Reps. John T. Doolittle of Rocklin and Richard W. Pombo of Tracy.

Of 31 Democrats, 15 voted with the president and in support of the testing provision--led by Rep. George Miller of Martinez, the party’s point man in the House on education. Others following Bush and Miller were Reps. Howard L. Berman of Mission Hills, Lois Capps of Santa Barbara, Gary A. Condit of Ceres, Susan A. Davis of San Diego, Calvin Dooley of Hanford, Anna G. Eshoo of Atherton, Jane Harman of Redondo Beach, Tom Lantos of San Mateo, Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, Juanita Millender-McDonald of Carson, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, Pete Stark of Fremont and Ellen O. Tauscher of Alamo.