Reauthorize NCLB With National Standards

By Patrick Mattimore

Suppose you show up for a track meet at your local high school to watch your daughter perform. She’s in the high-jump competition and she clears the bar, which is set at 6 feet. None of the other competitors can clear the height, but the competition’s organizers decide to allow individuals to submit testimonials from their coaches that they had cleared the height sometime during practice. Not the best method of judging performance, eh?

The federal No Child Left Behind Act is already flawed because it allows states to set low standards. Proposals to make the law more flexible would work the same way as our hypothetical high-jump contest, allowing states and districts even more loopholes. We don’t need to give school districts additional license to construct fun-house mirrors that distort our kids’ poor performance. We need national subject-matter standards, such as those represented by testing under the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Under the NCLB law, students in grades 3-8 are tested annually in reading and math; students are tested once in high school. It was inevitable that such an ambitious education reform policy would run into some growing pains and stumbling blocks. But now, as Congress considers the law’s reauthorization, it’s remarkable that legislators and the Bush administration are constructing new stumbling blocks, rather than sweeping away the detritus...