[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 25 (Monday, March 3, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1816-S1817]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  RECENT REPORTS AND GROWING AGREEMENT ON THE NEED FOR HIGH ACADEMIC 
                               STANDARDS

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, first I would like to call attention to 
several recent reports that have come out on the issue of high academic 
standards and the need for high standards and national standards in our 
schools, and refer to those reports and perhaps put them in context.
  I think it is clear from the reports that I am going to refer to here 
that there is a need for accelerating the progress that our country is 
making in developing world class academic standards. It is also clear 
that the States and local school districts are having great 
difficulties in determining for themselves what those standards ought 
to be, which is a large and costly task.
  First, I will refer to the comprehensive Third International Math and 
Science Study that was recently released. It shows that math standards 
have not yet been implemented at the classroom level in many of our 
schools, and our students score at or below the average on math and 
science compared to students in other nations.
  Mr. President, you will remember that one of the goals which the 
Governors and President Bush established in Charlottesville in 1989 was 
that the United States would be first in the world in math and science 
by the year 2000. In fact, the reality is very different from that 
lofty goal that was set 8 years ago.
  This first chart here indicates the average math scores of eighth 
graders on international tests. We can see in the group of nations that 
are considered top performers that the United States is not listed. 
Those nations are Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and 
Belgium-Flemish.
  In the middle range, the United States is at the very bottom, far 
behind the Russian Federation. After us, there are the bottom 
performers, and the most we can say with pride is that we are not in 
that category.

  But, Mr. President, I think most parents in this country would aspire 
to our doing better than we are showing we have done on this test. And 
I hope very much that we can.
  Here is a second chart that makes somewhat the same point. This chart 
indicates that of students scoring among the top 10 percent of eighth 
graders on international tests, 45 percent of these were from 
Singapore, and 34 percent from South Korea. It goes on down to where, 
in math the United States had only 5 percent of the world's top 
students in math, and only 13 percent in science. So, clearly, again, 
we find ourselves very far down on the list of nations in this 
comparison.
  There is also a new national report card on education that has been 
published by Education Week, which is a respected publication in our 
country. It confirms the findings of several previous reports that the 
standards many States have now established may not be rigorous enough 
compared to other nations' standards, and, also, that there are all too 
few States that plan to hold students or teachers accountable for 
measurable results.
  Let me show you these two charts to make this point, Mr. President. 
The first of these is a chart entitled, ``Who's Accountable?'' What 
this essentially says is that only those few States that come up on the 
map here as colored yellow are States that have standards for their 
graduates from high school. Clearly, most of the country--and, 
unfortunately, my State included--do not have accountability standards 
that students have to meet in order to graduate from high school. 
Clearly, this is a problem that we need to address as a nation.
  Another chart, ``8th Grade Math Course-Taking.'' This indicates very 
clearly that most of our eighth-graders are simply taking general math 
and only 19 percent, according to this analysis, are, in fact, taking 
algebra at the time they go into the eighth grade. This is one of the 
reasons we do so poorly on the international comparisons of mathematics 
scores.
  Finally, the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress math 
scores, which were just released last week, show that over 30 percent 
of 4th, 8th, and 12th-graders lack basic math skills, despite recent 
progress.
  Let me show you that chart, Mr. President. When you look at this, you

[[Page S1817]]

can see a very modest upward trend from 1990 to 1992 to 1996 at the 
three different grade levels, 4th, 8th, and 12th. As you can see, we 
are nowhere near approaching the level of improvement that is necessary 
if we are going to meet any of the national goals that we have set out 
for ourselves.
  Delays in developing standards have been made worse by the fact that, 
despite the abundance of tests and report cards published by State and 
local education agencies, very little of the information is comparable 
from district to district, or very little of the information is set at 
a high enough standard for us to make reasonable comparisons to these 
international tests.
  As Education Week recently pointed out, ``If the data that we depend 
on to monitor the economy were as incomplete, as unreliable, and as out 
of date as the data we depend on to monitor education in the United 
States, we might as well have the economy of a Third World country.''
  Instead, we have a hodgepodge of different tests and standards, most 
of them testing basic skills rather than world-class materials, a lot 
of data that only describes how students in one area are doing compared 
to how they did in the previous year.
  Differences in student ``pass rates'' on State and national testing 
indicate enormous gaps in what we are testing for. Let me show you the 
final chart that I have here, Mr. President, to make that point. You 
can see from this chart entitled ``State NAEP Scores for 4th Grade 
Reading Compared to the State's Own Assessment'' that, for example, in 
the State of Wisconsin, it shows here that 35 percent of the students 
are shown to reach the standard that NAEP sets on their National Fourth 
Grade Reading Test. In their State standard test, Wisconsin shows 88 
percent of their students meeting the standards. So you can see there 
is very little comparability between what the States are testing for 
and the level of performance that they are expecting and what the NAEP, 
the national assessment, is testing for.

  As a result, we still have schools that are doing superbly, and we 
also have schools that are doing miserably. Many times they are in the 
very same areas and in the same school districts. Parents and educators 
often do not even know which of those types of schools their own 
children are in.
  In response to this situation, many have come to agree that we need 
to set our standards much higher and we need to gather more accurate 
information in order to improve achievement, as has been done with 
great success in several parts of the private sector.
  The National Association of Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 
and the Business Round Table have now focused their joint efforts on 
raising standards and promoting more accountability in our schools.
  The National Education Association president, Bob Chase, spoke out 
about the need for his 2.2-million-member union to support key changes 
such as these.
  Frequent education critics Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch recently 
offered surprising enthusiasm for standards. Let me quote: ``how 
powerful it will be for parents and teachers to compare the math 
prowess of 8th graders in, say, Phoenix and Minneapolis, to the 
performance of their peers in Korea and the Czech Republic.''
  In addition to national polls showing strong support for high 
standards, a Public Agenda poll last month showed that high school 
students themselves know that our expectations for them are low, and 
those very high school students respond accordingly.
  Raising academic standards has proven to be an immense and costly job 
for States and for school districts, who have been left to do the job 
largely on their own. They have been struggling to make the necessary 
progress but have been unable to do so. For these reasons, we need 
renewed national efforts toward making standards a reality in the near 
future.

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