Worse Than the Status Quo? National Standards and Exams

There is general recognition that students in other industrialized countries achieve at a much higher level than American students. They do better on the international examinations that allow us to make comparisons, and their school-leaving exams are more demanding than any our students face. What are these countries doing that we aren't? Of course you can't just pick up something from a foreign culture and drop it into your own, but we can learn a lot by comparing the way school systems work in other countries with what goes on in ours.

There are many differences, but one of the most basic is that nearly all of these countries have national education standards. They have decided what their students need to learn, and they have developed a national curriculum and national system of tests to find out whether or not the students learn it. In some countries, the curriculum is so carefully prescribed that you could predict what math lesson a fourth grader would be studying on a given day of the year. In other countries, there is more leeway. Still, national standards mean that a student graduating from high school has achieved a certain level of knowledge.

These systems have many advantages over ours. Each of our states and 15,000 school districts is more or less doing its own thing when it comes to curriculum. Some create their own or adapt curriculums from other districts; some take ideas from here and there. So our money and efforts are spread thin, and some districts have much better curriculums than others. With national curriculums, resources and talent can be concentrated, so children in every school district can benefit from excellent materials.

National curriculums mean that kids moving from one school district to another do not have to waste time by repeating material they already know or struggle to catch up on stuff they've missed. These curriculums also mean that you have an answer to the question of how to prepare teachers: Teach them to teach the national curriculum and test them on how well they do it. U.S. colleges and universities have no such guidance in preparing or assessing teachers. Their students will teach in different states and school districts with different curriculums. So what they get are abstract courses that most teachers say did not help them learn how to teach.

National standards and exams go hand in hand. Critics here say that testing kids won't make them work harder, but in all these countries, the national tests have important consequences. Kids know they need to work hard because test scores determine whether or not they get into university or what kind of job they get. This sounds harsh, but it is fairer than our system. Everybody knows exactly what is required to succeed, so students can work toward this goal and teachers can help them. Something similar happened here when minimum competency tests came in. Many people said they were cruel because disadvantaged kids would never be able to pass them. But millions of youngsters worked hard to do just that because they wanted a high school diploma.

Congress is considering a system of education standards and assessments for this country. It would be different from the systems I've been talking about because it would be voluntary rather than compulsory, and it would not be run by the federal government. Still, a lot of people are strongly opposed to the idea of national standards. They say our country is too diverse to get agreement on curriculum. But California has done it, and its population is as diverse as that of the U.S.

Many people are especially critical of the testing part of the proposal. They say that the exams could be more of the same standardized tests we've been trying to get away from. They also say the exams will be unfair to disadvantaged students and that any exams that have serious consequences are a bad idea. It's true that there are some real dangers. It's also true that we have the knowledge and capacity to avoid them. And if the assessments aren't exactly what we want the first time, we can work on them until they are.

There would be consequences for getting this system wrong, but there also are consequences for continuing to do things the way we are now. Our students don't know much, and no wonder. Except for the few students who hope to go to selective colleges, they don't work hard in school. And there's no reason for them to do so because they know it won't count. This is destructive for them and for our country.

We worry a great deal about how exams can damage students who fail -- or who fear failing. But we don't worry at all about never teaching kids that if they work hard, they can achieve something -- like mastery of a subject and a good mark on a test. If high school sports programs were run this way, football coaches would hesitate to let their teams play. What if the kids lost? And if they did let their teams take the field, they'd insist that games be played without counting any of the goals.

Congress has the opportunity to put up some money to help develop national standards and better assessments than we now have. People who predict disaster should look at how these systems work in other industrialized countries. Some of these systems are better than others, but none is a disaster, and there's no reason to believe we'd have one here. In fact, there's every reason to believe we could make such a system work.