A TEMPEST OVER NATIONAL TESTING

By Romesh Ratnesar

The trouble with Congressional Republicans isn't that they like a good fight--it's the fights they like to pick. Time and again, most notably during the government shutdown in 1995, the Clinton Administration has beat up on G.O.P. lawmakers and in the end subjected them to painful public embarrassment. So when House Republicans forced a showdown last week with the President over his treasured plan for national math and reading tests for students--despite a White House threat to veto an entire spending bill if the testing money was not included--it seemed on the face of it that these guys were just gluttons for punishment.

After all, the President's proposal to develop voluntary fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math tests by 1999 has enjoyed public support since its unveiling last February. Education experts agree that American public schools badly need tougher--and higher--national standards. National testing would enable parents and schools from Cambridge, Mass., to Compton, Calif., to measure an individual student's performance against a common yardstick. A well-executed national testing system might also ease the transition to charter schooling and public-school choice by providing a standard method of assessing different schools' strengths. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, a majority of adults surveyed said they support the President's testing plan.

Another knockout for the White House, right? Well, no. Even as the testing issue has charged to the top of the President's fall agenda, the ranks of those charging behind him have oddly dwindled, as former allies splinter into bickering special-interest groups and switch to the enemy camp. Only seven states have signed on to the plan. In the House, an improbable coalition of social conservatives and progressive Democrats were at week's end on the verge of stripping a $279 billion education bill of all its national-test money. That forced the Administration to scramble for a compromise in the Senate; to save the testing money in that version of the bill, the White House agreed to turn over control of the tests to an independent agency. And the tests might still get axed when the two chambers reconcile their respective bills next month. "Americans have asked us for common-sense education ideas," says Republican Bill Goodling of Pennsylvania, the leader of the House antitesting insurgents, "not poorly designed federal tests created by Washington bureaucrats."

How did this happen to a seemingly popular idea? From the start, powerful conservative organizations like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum derided the very notion of national examinations, claiming they violate a cherished American ideal of local-school control. Worse, they warned, the national tests would lead to homogenized classroom curriculums and ultimately to federal educrats wresting control of American classrooms from parents, teachers and students. Says Jennifer Marshall, an analyst with the Family Research Council: "We don't think there is such a thing as a good federal test."

What's more maddening to national-test advocates is the defection of their supposed friends on the left. Liberal critics assert that the math test will stigmatize poor and minority students who don't perform well. They fret that schools will use national-exam results in determining who to promote to the next grade. And they even complain that the reading test discriminates against students who don't read English. Feelings run so strong in the House that virtually all members of the left-leaning black and Hispanic caucuses plan to vote against the tests this week. "If national testing went down in flames," says Chester Finn, a conservative analyst at the Hudson Institute, "it would be because those on the right couldn't stand the word national, and those on the left can't abide testing."

Then there's the matter of the test questions. Test designers have released a few sample problems, but no one knows exactly what the exams will look like. And so everyone is anxious. Critics charge that the committees drafting the exams are using them to promote faddish pedagogies like "whole language" and "fuzzy math." Last month a disgruntled group of teachers and academics penned a letter to the President contending that the eighth-grade math test isn't tough enough in measuring basic computational skills. On the other side, the Cambridge-based watchdog group FairTest opposes the exams, executive director Laura Barrett says, for focusing on "rote memorization rather than creative problem solving."

Administration officials chalk up the opposition to overheated speculation on all sides, and they're partly right. But the White House has made miscues of its own. Early supporters of the national-test plan, like Finn and Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch, have deserted the President because the tests were developed through the politically appointed Department of Education rather than by a nonpartisan body like the independent National Assessment Governing Board. "It's wrong to have a new national test every time a new President is elected," Ravitch says. Last month Education Secretary Richard Riley agreed to surrender control of the tests to the governing board; the handover was cemented in last week's Senate bill. But critics say the concessions come too late in the test-writing process. Says Finn: "It's like asking the new cook to please cook by the recipe that someone else came up with."

Others are questioning whether the country needs new national exams at all. A federally monitored examination already exists: the 28-year-old National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that provides reliable state-by-state performance data--but not the scores of individual students. For that, many public schools use privately developed exams, such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test. "American school kids take more than 100 million standardized tests each year," says Barrett. "We already know what schools and which children perform well or poorly." Asks Boston College professor George F. Madaus: "How is this going to be any different from a first-class test from a commercial publishing company?" (One difference: a higher price tag. The department estimates the tests will cost $12 per child--the Iowa exam costs less than half that--and $27 million overall.)

In the end, that may be too much buck and too little bang to sway a Congress averse to social spending. But even as they went about savaging the national-test plan last week, the White House's opponents on the Hill proffered an expensive alternative. "Rather than spend [millions] on one more test," Goodling said, "House Republicans and many Democrats would rather send federal dollars directly to the classroom." Sounds surprisingly un-Republican. Did we mention that 1998 is an election year?

--With reporting by Chandrani Ghosh/Washington

With reporting by CHANDRANI GHOSH/WASHINGTON