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Standards Count How Can The National Assessment of Educational Progress Make a Difference in the Next Ten Years? What Role Should Education Standards Play in Our Country's Future?
DINNER VIDEOTAPE PRESENTATION AND PANEL
VIDEOTAPED MESSAGES FROM THREE U.S. SECRETARIES OF EDUCATION [Edited] The presentation and panel were at the Carlton Hotel, 16th and K Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. at 8:30 p.m., Mark D. Musick, Chairman of NAGB, presiding.
RICHARD W. RILEY
Good evening and congratulations to all of you who are attending the NAGB tenth anniversary dinner. I'm so sorry that I'm not with you tonight, but I know that Mark Musick [Chairman of the Governing Board] has all of you heading in the right direction. I thank Mark and the previous chairs for their strong leadership. And I thank all of you for your commitment to improving American education. Now Mark has asked me to answer a few questions and let me do that. First of all, I want to reaffirm my support for the National Assessment Governing Board. NAGB is one of those small organizations that often goes unnoticed, yet NAGB is making a powerful difference in shaping and improving American education. As you know, I served on NAGB for a number of years, and I am very proud of that time. I think, some five years ago, the whole issue of raising [education] standards was very much up in the air. Opponents questioned the idea of saying shall we use standards for all students. Yet today a new American consensus has developed around the idea of higher standards. Forty-nine states are raising their standards and Iowa's local commitment to challenging standards remains very strong. In this new American consensus, setting high standards for all of our children is really a distinct change. This effort commits us to ending our nation's two-tiered system of high standards for some and a watered-down curriculum for too many others. More than ever before improving education has become the focus of national attention. Parents all over this nation recognize that the times have changed and their children really do need to know more to get ahead and to reach their own dreams. The American people have come to the conclusion that smaller classes, better-trained teachers, a focus on mastering the basics and a core academic curriculum are all part of a new consensus that is definitely on high standards. Now that's why the development of quality assessments by NAEP is so important. They tell the American people where we are and what we need to be doing to get where we want to go. I also believe that those of us involved in the standards movement need to make very sure that the American people recognize the long-term benefits of this new emphasis on higher standards. I encourage the effort that NAGB is making to develop performance standards linked to a strong assessment system. However, I also strongly urge NAGB to actively continue its research to make sure that these performance standards are practical and are attainable. We are moving in the right direction in developing performance standards. But we always, always need to be assessing our own work. Like all of you, I believe that NAEP provides a valuable service to the American people because of its independence and its integrity. NAEP gives the American people a reliable, national report card on the progress we're making in our national effort to improve education. And I believe that NAGB should remain independent and bipartisan and should continue to foster this growing American consensus around high standards. Thank you very much.
LAMAR ALEXANDER We really don't have an education problem in this country, we've got a political problem. We know exactly what to do, we're just not doing it. So we have to create an environment in which education changes. In my book, the drivers for that change are: number one, high standards; number two, get rid of the overhead, the union rules and government regulations that suffocate the schools; and number three, give the parents more choices. And standards are the first step. So all across the country where you have teachers or principals or business people or anyone else who wants to improve their schools, they are starting with standards: What do kids need to know and be able to do? And then there is the value of NAEP, the value of NAGB. People find all these words and initials confusing, which is why I suggested years ago that we think of it all as the nation's report card. The value is for a governor or a school board member or a reformer, who's in the middle of his or her reform, and they're not necessarily professional educators, they just want a good school. And they turn at some point and say, "Well, what should kids know? And what should they be able to do? Somebody give me an answer about that. I'm not an expert on how much math a child should know in the eighth grade." And, of course, what the nation's report card will tell them is that in 1996, about 24 percent of eighth graders in the country were proficient in math. And about 38 percent were below basic, which means they were basically incompetent in math. NAEP can tell you that about the whole country. NAEP can tell you that about a whole state. And I think NAEP should be able to tell you that about your own school district. There is a great deal of discussion and division and argument about national tests. I have grave reservations about them myself. I don't want this senator or that senator in control of any national test that someone has to take. So I'm not optimistic about national tests. But this nation's report card is a national thermometer. And it ought to be available in every school district. I think NAEP will become more and more important over the next ten years. That makes it absolutely desirable that policy be set by as independent and bipartisan a board as possible--because this is the nation's report card. It is the only measurement like this that the nation has. We have 30 years experience with it. It has broad acceptance. It's not politically driven. It's not caught up in all the other agendas. My guess is when we get five or ten years down the road, it will still be the only national report card we have. I believe that testing and standards-setting are going to be done by states and by local school districts, and I believe they should be. So the nation's report card will stand alone. It should continue to have high standards. It should continue to stay free of the interest groups and the political agendas. And the best way to do that is to continue to have as independent and as bipartisan a Governing Board as possible. It will be very useful to us if we do that. But if NAEP loses that independent, bipartisan capacity, it will become a so-called national examination, and it will quickly lose its credibility. It will probably lose its support, and it will go the way of all the other efforts to try to impose a centralized standard-setting mechanism.
WILLIAM J. BENNETT
The National Assessment of Educational Progress -- or N-A-E-P -- is one of the most important federal educational responsibilities. It's one that I believe exists for a federal government, no matter what its shape, no matter what other things it does in education, because it is important for the people of the United States of America, through their government, to have a way of finding out how our students are doing. Now immediately, one has to say this must be insulated from political pressure because a lot of government is subject to partisan political pressure. But to have a measuring rod, to have something by which we can take the nation's temperature in education is very important. A lot of the state standards, as we have seen, are very inefficient, very unsatisfactory. So we need something that provides an answer when people ask what to me seems to be a very good question, "How are the nation's children doing educationally?" We shouldn't have to wait for an international assessment to find out that we need improvement in math and reading. We should have that instrument. NAEP has been around for a while. It's the best thing we've got. We need to improve it, insulate it, make sure it's doing its job, but then I think also to extend its work. I was very pleased to appoint the Alexander-James Group. And I would like to see NAEP and NAGB continue on the same course [that the study group recommended]. The Clinton national test idea burned and failed, and it burned and failed for good reason: people didn't have confidence that this way of approaching things would be insulated from political pressure. We do not want the Department of Education doing this. We need NAEP to be stronger, we need it to be independent, and we very much need it to work. It's not threading the needle that we have to do. We can't let it become so politically partisan that it's of no use to anybody any more or it just becomes part of a massive politically correct agenda. On the other hand, we can't let it become so small, so narrow, that it is of very little use to the nation at large. I believe NAEP is a great instrument. If protected, if developed and extended in the right way and insulated from political pressure, then we can all be very proud of it. First, I think we've got to get the charter and the selection of membership and the direction of the course of NAEP in the hands of independent scholars and independent people. Second NAEP needs to be given the wherewithal to develop the instruments we need. That means it needs money. And third, NAEP has to have the capacity so that states and local districts, individual schools even, can make the best use of it. We can see NAEP, obviously, having great value as a national instrument. But, as well, we need to be sure that it is of use and value to people at the local level. So they can abandon when appropriate, those instruments of measurement which don't make any sense, and instead seek a thermometer to take the temperature [of academic achievement] which is consistent. The advantage of the national thermometer, if I may stay with that metaphor, is that it gives everybody in the country the same target, the same standard. We're very much in need of that, and I think the record of NAGB and NAEP is very good. I've encouraged, my conservative colleagues, to see the need for national standards. Conservatives believe in standards. You say you're worried about the collapse of standards? So let's have these standards. What we don't want is the politicization of the standards, obviously, the corruption of the standards. Liberals say they are for achievement. They are not really fuzzy thinkers, they really want good, solid, hard ground on which to stand. Well, fine, here's the challenge. And I think, of all the things that have been done by the Department of Education, few can equal the record of NAGB and NAEP on this score. But there's work that needs to be done. We need the independent audit of American education. We need to insulate that audit from any kind of pressure of an untoward sort. We need to give the wherewithal to the people involved to run the operation. And we need to be sure that people at the local level can make maximum use of it. That seems to me to sum up where we are.
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