NCLB Panel Calls for Federal Role in Setting National Standards

Congress should set up a process to establish national academic standards and tests that states could adopt as their own or use as a model for improving their current standards, a high-profile bipartisan panel says in a report released today.

Lawmakers also should appropriate $400 million over four years for states to create data systems to track individual students’ academic growth from year to year and determine the effectiveness of individual teachers, the Commission on No Child Left Behind urges in its final report.

“We think the time has come for national standards,” Roy E. Barnes, a co-chairman of the panel convened by the Aspen Institute, a Washington think tank, and a former governor of Georgia, said in an interview. “Fairness requires—particularly in math, science, and reading—that...