The Travails of the Bush Plan For Education

By Diane Ravitch

George W. Bush began his presidency with a good plan to improve education. He proposed that the states should test every child from grades 3 to 8 in reading and math, to make sure that parents and teachers know how well each child is doing. The federal government, he said, would pay for test development and would recognize those states that raised student achievement. With this strategy, he argued, no child would be left behind.

Integral to the Bush plan is the idea that each state would select or develop a test that produced comparable grade-by-grade data from year to year, and that the states' progress (or lack of progress) would be independently confirmed by the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing samples of students in the states and the nation for more than 30 years. President Bush modeled his plan on the success of the Texas testing-and-accountability strategy, which has enjoyed strong bipartisan support over the past dozen or so years.

On NAEP tests of mathematics, Texas 4th graders went from 21st in the nation to sixth in the nation from 1992 to 1996. No less impressive, black 4th graders in Texas outperformed their African- American peers in every other state in math. On the NAEP writing test for 8th graders in 1998, Texas was one of the top-scoring states. Twenty percent of Texas' black and Hispanic students scored "proficient" on the writing exam; for Hispanic students, that was twice the national average, and for black students it was nearly three times the national...