Road to national standards actually began more than 100 years ago
By Del Stover
Fall 09 -- When the first serious debate over national education standards took place, gentlemen wore frock coats, ladies only taught school until they were married, and children often rode horses to school.
The year was 1892, and the National Education Association created the Committee of Ten, a group of nationally distinguished educators charged with establishing new curricula standards for high schools and admissions standards for colleges and universities.
Among its influential recommendations was the school structure seen today: eight years of elementary education and four years of high school, with all students -- whether destined for college, the farm, or the factory floor -- being provided a similar quality of education.
As today, opinions about what should be taught provoked their share of controversy: Why, some asked at the time, should schools teach science to girls who would make no use of the knowledge once they became wives and mothers?
In more modern times, criticism against national standards has been no less vocal. In the early 1990s, President George H.W. Bush funded the development of national standards, but concerns about a growing federal role in education sparked opposition. When U.S. history standards were released, they also came under savage attack for being anti-Western and “politically correct,” and the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn them.
That stopped the standards movement dead in its tracks.
A few years later, President Bill Clinton took a different approach, funding state efforts to develop their own standards and tests. But with each state going its own way, he eventually proposed in 1997 that a national test provide some common measure of state progress. Congress responded by banning the use of federal funds for a national test.
Over the past decade, various professional groups have worked to offer their own visions of what should be taught in reading, math, and science. But the biggest influence on national standards, some argue, was enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002.
That influence wasn’t positive, critics charge. By allowing states to rely on their own assessment systems -- while threatening sanctions for a lack of progress -- NCLB gave states no reason to raise standards but every incentive to water down their testing efforts to guarantee rising test scores and avoid politically embarrassing federal action.
At one point, Time magazine has reported, Mississippi announced that 89 percent of its fourth-graders scored proficient or better in reading on its state assessment -- while only 18 percent scored proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
If anything, NAEP is as close to a real success as the standards movement has enjoyed in recent decades. First administered in 1969 -- but only after a political agreement at the time not to allow state-by-state comparisons -- NAEP is the most reliable, if still imperfect, gauge today of the true academic progress of the nation’s schoolchildren.
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