National Standards

PRESIDENT-ELECT Bill Clinton is right to make education a top priority.He is wrong in his understanding of what needs fixing.Not one of his main educational policies -- increased loan assistance for college students, national educational standards linked to federal aid and more job retraining -- addresses the problems we are facing.Here are some propositions that Mr. Clinton and Richard W. Riley, his nominee for secretary of education, should look into:* Giving qualified students a chance at college is something we already do well.

WASHINGTON -- Marking an important shift in U.S. education, a high-level advisory panel is calling for creation of voluntary national standards for what schoolchildren ought to know and a system of tests to determine what they have mastered.The recommendations, which appear in a report to be released later this month, represent a rare consensus among Bush administration officials, education-minded governors, congressional leaders, teacher unions and other education groups. And they suggest that in its drive to improve the schools, education may be moving away from the decentralization of policy and curriculum that has always been its hallmark.

WASHINGTON -- In a major departure for American education, a federal advisory panel is calling for voluntary national curriculum standards and national tests for American schoolchildren.Such standards would spell out, for the first time on a national level, what children should be expected to learn and what level of achievement is good enough at different stages, according to the National Council on Education Standards and Testing, an advisory group of major political and educational leaders whose approval is crucial to the success of any such effort.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed standard definitions for the terms recycled and recyclable, marketing claims increasingly used on retail items.Complaints from consumer groups, businesses and state officials generals across the country prompted the EPA to move a little closer to creating national standards for using language that claim products are environmentally safe.The announcement came yesterday at a EPA-sponsored conference in Baltimore on environmental labeling which ends today.

Never has the nation been safer from foreign menaces, and never before has the nation been graduating students less well-educated than those of the immediately preceding generation. These facts warrant this conclusion: Today the principal threat to America is America's public-education establishment.It tenaciously opposes national testing of primary and secondary school students. As Chester Finn of Vanderbilt says in his indispensable new book, ''We Must Take Charge,'' the education establishment knows that testing would shatter the public's complacency and bring demands for accountability.