National Standards

PRESIDENT CLINTON kicked off his education crusade yesterday in the Annapolis State House, mounting the bully pulpit to preach a gospel of national standards in reading and mathematics as a way to improve student achievement. Without such measuring sticks, the president said, children and their parents have no way of knowing if they have mastered the basic skills needed to compete for jobs in an increasingly high-tech and highly competitive world.The president put it in stark terms. "Sooner or later," he told the Maryland General Assembly, "your children are going to have to face the fact that either they can read or they can't; they either can do math or they can't; they know algebra or they don't."

IN MARCH 1994 Congress enacted Goals 2000, the culmination of a bipartisan effort to raise academic standards in the nation's schools. The Bush administration began the ambitious process, awarding grants to national groups of teachers and scholars in science, history, English, and other fields to develop national voluntary standards.The Clinton administration carried it on. Goals 2000, which became the centerpiece of the administration's education agenda, featured a 19-member National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC)

WASHINGTON -- Until now it has seemed both paradoxical and axiomatic that a nation that needs national standards for the teaching of its history should not seek such standards. This is because those who are apt to be called upon to write such standards will be teachers of history, the shortcomings of whose teaching have occasioned the call for standards.A profession riven by intellectual disputes arising from political differences cannot be counted on to come to an acceptable consensus concerning what and how students should learn.

A year ago, President Clinton signed into law his administration's ambitious Goals 2000: Educate America Act. "Today will be remembered as the day the United States got serious about education," the Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley said within hours of its passage.The high-minded ideals of Goals 2000 seem universal. Who could dispute the importance of sending children to school "ready to learn" or the need for schools "free of drugs and violence," -- two of the eight National Education Goals.

WASHINGTON -- Every school in America will be safe, disciplined and drug-free. U.S. students will be first in the world in science and math achievement. Every adult will be able to compete in a global economy.Who can argue with a vision like that?Under the Goals 2000 program signed into law by President Clinton last week, that is the government's grand hope forAmerica on the verge of the 21st century.The program, hailed as the federal government's first effort to create standards for what all students should know, emerged from the education summit that President George Bush held with governors in 1989.

Imagine an America without standards -- no weights and measures, anyone who likes drives a car, airline pilots who are long on enthusiasm but short on skills, self-declared brain surgeons, basketball players who can dribble but not shoot. It's a hair-raising vision, but exactly the situation we face in our nation's schools.Alone among the industrialized nations, America has no national education standards. The product of our frontier past, "local control" is a venerated, even mythical tradition.

IN HIS campaign document "Putting People First," Bill Clinton promised to create "a set of national standards for what students should know" and an examination system "to measure our students' and schools' progress in meeting the national standards."Unfortunately, the administration's school reform bill is not likely to fulfill that promise but would expand dramatically the scope and cost of federal regulation of local schools.Instead of emphasizing standards for students, the bill focuses on standards for schools.

Just about everyone agrees raising the standards of American schools is a good idea. But educators don't have a firm fix on what that means.In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emphasis was on making sure no one got through high school without mastering fundamental reading and math skills. Maryland's Project Basic, for example, established "functional" tests in writing and citizenship as well as math and reading. About three-quarters of the states also adopted minimum competency tests. And there were signs of improvement, notably a closing of the gap in achievement between black and white students.

WASHINGTON -- To help the former Soviet bloc's transition to a market economy, the International Monetary Fund unveiled a program yesterday to provide billions of dollars in loans to Russia and more than 20 other countries under less stringent conditions than those governing the typical IMF loans.Michel Camdessus, the fund's managing director, said that the program would provide $4 billion to $6 billion in loans over the next 18 months to help former Soviet bloc nations buy imported goods, ranging from food to spare parts needed to modernize industry.

WASHINGTON -- In its first major initiative on education, the Clinton administration intends to establish the first national academic standards for American schoolchildren, so that the performance of students from all social levels and regions of the country can be gauged against the same uniform goals.The standards would attempt to merge what is now a patchwork of vastly different, subjective -- and in some cases, non-existent -- standards in school districts and states across the country.