[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 143 (Wednesday, October 22, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10927-S10937]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       FURTHER CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE FISCAL YEAR 1998

  The Senate continued with the consideration of the joint resolution.
  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I rise to raise certain issues about the 
continuing resolution which is before the Senate. It is a plan to 
continue the operation of Government for the next several weeks while 
we finish the appropriations process. As you well know and as most of 
us are keenly aware, there are matters that are still in controversy in 
the committees which are convened between the House and Senate to try 
to arrive at a final appropriations measure or a series of final 
appropriations measures that we could send to the President.
  One of those contentious appropriations measures is the Labor, Health 
and Human Services and Education appropriations bill. In that 
appropriations measure are a number of important things that relate to 
the future of the country. I submit, however, that none are more 
important than the components of this measure that relate specifically 
to the education of young Americans. If I were to try to rank the 
responsibilities of a culture, I would have to rank very close to the 
top of the list the responsibility to prepare the next generation to be 
successful and to survive. I suppose survival is more important than 
success, but the idea that we have to prepare the next generation is a 
very important idea, and we want to do more than just prepare it for 
survival. I think we want to prepare it for success.
  The job of preparation has been labeled in a variety of cultures in 
different ways. I think we expect a lot of the preparation to take 
place in the homes of America. We expect a lot of parents, and I think 
we have found that over the course of time we succeed most when we 
expect a lot of parents and when we get high delivery from parents in 
terms of what happens to young people.
  Parents are not expected to do it all, however. We have a pretty 
substantial education system in the country, public education if you 
will, which is designed to help prepare young people for their lives in 
the next century. I think the way in which we address those issues 
related to education is fundamental. It is very, very important. As the 
father of three children, all of whom went to public schools, I know 
how important it is, and I am delighted to say they are all doing 
pretty well now, although my youngest is still in college so we want to 
make sure he continues that particular practice of preparation.
  Education is among the top priorities of a culture. The preparation 
of one generation, the development of the skills to survive and succeed 
in the next generation is a top priority, a top responsibility. That is 
one of the reasons it demands our focus when the Federal Government 
starts to expand its participation in or indicate its intention to 
interfere with education as conducted at the local level. When the 
President of the United States in his State of the Union Message this 
year indicated that he wanted to have a Federally developed test, that 
there would be a test given to every fourth grade and eighth grade 
student across the country and that that test would be used to measure 
the success or failure of education systems around the country, I think 
a lot of us sat up and began to take notice. When there is talk about 
having a Federal test, a sort of one-size-fits-all test, with a group 
of bureaucrats in Washington deciding what would be tested and what 
would not be tested and what teaching techniques would be honored in 
the test and what teaching techniques would not be honored in the test, 
you begin to raise questions about this most serious and fundamental 
part of preparing the next generation to both survive and succeed.
  As a matter of fact, I think there is a role for Government, but I am 
not sure about a uniformity that comes from Washington, DC, that 
ignores or displaces the responsibility of parents and local school 
boards and teachers at the local level.
  In my previous opportunities for public service, I had 
responsibilities at the State level. I was Governor of the State of 
Missouri for 8 years, and education was one of our top priorities. We 
wanted to do what we could to make sure that we got the best 
achievement. After all, we did not necessarily want education for the 
sake of the education community. The focal point of education is the 
next generation, and how well it prepares them, and so we want to 
target student achievement. We want to always be sensitive to what will 
be the operative set of conditions which will result in the greatest 
student achievement, because if we can get students to achieve and 
their preparation is high and their skill levels are strong, they will 
be survivors and succeeders in the next generation. They will be 
swimmers and not sinkers, and that is very important.

  One of the things that I had the opportunity to do when I was 
Governor of my State was to lead the Education Commission of the 
States. This is a group of officials, legislators, Governors, and 
school officials from every State in America, and they come together 
with a view toward finding ways to sort of exchange information. They 
are able to share about what is working in a particular jurisdiction--
it is a clearinghouse. It is a way to say maybe you ought to try this 
in your locality. Perhaps it would not work there but perhaps it would. 
What are ways we can improve?
  The information we began to develop, at least I began to be aware of, 
was that perhaps the single most important operative condition in 
educational achievement by students is the involvement of parents. How 
deeply involved in the education progress and product and projects are 
the parents? If the parents really care, if the community, meaning 
first the family, which is the fundamental building block of 
communities, and, second, the teaching community and, third, the larger 
community, which we think of as our towns or neighborhoods, if all of 
those institutions assign a very high value to education and are deeply 
involved in education and feel engaged in the educational experience, 
wonderful things happen to student levels of achievement.
  I think we could all figure out that would be the case just by using 
our common sense. But we never leave everything to total common sense 
when we are considering policy. We like to have surveys and we like to 
have education studies and control groups and

[[Page S10928]]

the like. But it is true that when families are deeply involved, when 
the local culture assigns a very high value to education, when they 
feel they are engaged, student achievement goes up substantially.
  Let me give you the results of a 1980 report. It was published in 
``Psychology in the Schools'', and it shows that family involvement 
improved Chicago elementary school children's performance in reading 
comprehension. Here is the data. One year after initiating a Chicago 
citywide program aimed at helping parents create academic support 
conditions in the home--in other words, involving parents in the 
schools--students in grades 1 through 6 intensively exposed to the 
program improved .5 to .6 grade equivalents in reading comprehension on 
the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than students less intensively involved 
in the program.
  Now, if you really talk about an improvement which is .5 to .6 over 
the other students, you are talking about a 50 percent better 
performance or a 60 percent better performance. That means if normal 
students went up 1 year of study, these students with activated home 
environments and engaged parents went up 1.5 years to 1.6 years.
  That is a real increase. I think some of our manufacturers, if they 
had the opportunity to get increases of 5 percent, not 50 percent, or 
increases of 6 percent, not 60 percent, in their output, they would 
have a tremendous competitive edge. But here is a study which says that 
when you actively engage parents, you get massive increases in the 
productivity in terms of the achievement levels of students. This 
happened when there was a contract signed by the superintendent, 
principal, teacher, parents, and student.
  Note the involvement here. The school officials, the principals, the 
teachers, the parents, and the students. They stipulated that parents 
would provide a special place for home study, that they would encourage 
the child by daily discussion, attend to the student's progress in 
school and compliment the child on such points, and cooperate with the 
teacher in providing all these things properly. This is real engagement 
by parents. More than 99 percent of the students in the 41 classes, 
grades 1 through 6, held such contracts that were signed by all the 
parties. It is a clear example of the fact that student achievement 
skyrockets when you have a culture at the local level which is engaged 
in the development of school improvement policies. This study was from 
``School-Based Family Socialization and Reading Achievement in the 
Inner-City,'' by H. J. Walberg, R. E. Bole, and H. C. Waxman in 
``Psychology in the Schools.''
  National surveys also demonstrate this. Listen to this: a national 
survey reveals that parental involvement is more important in high 
school achievement than is the parental level of education.
  So what it is really saying is that having smart parents is not 
important in terms of your educational achievement. Having parents that 
care about what you are doing and that are involved in the educational 
process, that is what drives student achievement.
  A 1989 report found that, although parent education level and income 
are associated with higher achievement in high school, when 
socioeconomic status is controlled, meaning if you will take 
socioeconomic status out, only parent involvement during high school 
had a significant positive impact on achievement. So the real operative 
condition of student achievement in the high school years--we already 
talked about the Chicago study which showed in grades 1 through 6 you 
had a 50 to 60 percent improvement performance--but in the high school 
years what really makes a difference is whether or not there is 
parental involvement.
  The report documents that students who enjoyed the most parental 
involvement, the students who had the most reinforcement, the strongest 
input from their culture, the ones who had the parents who were most 
likely to be participants, were most likely to achieve higher 
educational levels than their counterparts who did not have such 
involvement.
  It's kind of interesting. They developed a chart there. When parents 
were highly involved during high school, 80 percent of their students 
got additional education after high school. You see what this does for 
students is to energize them. They think, ``Education is important. I 
am going to get it. I am going to be involved in it.'' When parents 
were only moderately involved during their children's high school 
years, 68 percent of the students went on to studies after high school. 
When parents were not very involved, only 56 percent continued their 
education after high school. It makes a big difference.
  These statistics show that students who have lots of involvement by 
their parents during their high school years were nearly 1\1/2\ times 
as likely to get some postsecondary education or a BS or BA degree, as 
students whose parents were not very involved. Further, students of 
highly involved parents are more than three times as likely to obtain a 
bachelor's degree than their counterparts whose parents were not very 
involved. This study used data from the 1980 ``High School and Beyond'' 
national survey conducted by the National Center for Educational 
Statistics, particularly focusing on 11,227 seniors who participated in 
the 1980 ``High School and Beyond'' survey, and in the 1986 followup 
documentation.
  What we really have here is a fundamental understanding that when 
parents are involved in education, when parents are engaged in the 
educational process, students achieve. What I want to point out is when 
you have the President of the United States starting to nationalize 
schools by saying we are going to have a test and we are going to ask 
that everyone do, in school, what will show well on this test, you 
begin to say that you are going to test for a particular standard. And 
you begin to say we are going to make that standard up in Washington--
not by parents, not by local school boards, not by interested parties 
in the community at the local level--but we are going to have a group 
of bureaucrats in Washington, DC, who are unreachable, uninfluenceable 
by local parents, who are going to design a test.
  Of course, you know in order to pass a test you have to know 
basically what the test is wanting and you have to teach what the test 
wants. Once our schools begin the process of responding to the drummer 
in Washington, DC, teaching what that drummer wants instead of what is 
wanted at the local level, what is going to happen to parental 
involvement? How involved, how engaged, how important are parents going 
to feel when local school boards are no longer relevant? How successful 
are our students likely to be when their parents lose interest because 
no matter what they say they can't affect or change or direct the 
approach of their educational institutions, their schools?
  I think the strong indication here is that when you start to 
dislocate parents from the process and put in their place a 
bureaucracy--one that is thousands of miles away in many instances--you 
pull the rug out from under student achievement.
  The ultimate objective we are talking about is preparing the next 
generation to be survivors in the next century; to be succeeders; to be 
swimmers, not sinkers. And they do that best when their parents and the 
community is directly involved, has confidence in and is engaged in the 
education process. The absence of parental participation in that is, I 
think, a real threat to the success of our students.
  Let me just take you to some more examples. California and Maryland 
elementary schools achieved strong gains in student performance after 
implementing partnership programs which emphasize parental involvement. 
If we say to the parents, ``You don't matter, you can't affect 
curriculum, you can't affect what is being taught, we are going to 
decide all that in a bureaucracy in Washington, you just do as you are 
told,'' how much parental involvement are we going to be able to 
expect?

  I think people will really respond if they have the opportunity to 
look carefully and participate in the development of curricula and the 
way the schools are run. Here is the data from California and Maryland, 
both of which show strong gains in student performance after 
implementing what are called partnership programs, which emphasize 
parental involvement. A 1993 study describes how two elementary schools 
implemented a partnership program which emphasized two-way 
communication and mutual support between parents and teachers, enhanced

[[Page S10929]]

learning both at home and school, and joint decisionmaking between 
parents and teachers. Students at the Columbia Park School in Prince 
Georges County, MD, ``who once lagged far behind national averages, now 
perform above the 90th percentile in math, and above the 50th 
percentile in reading, after implementing the Partnership Program. Here 
is kind of an interesting thing. There are already ways to find out 
whether you are doing well, according to national averages. There are 
all kinds of tests that schools can implement in order to find that 
out.
  What we are really saying here is that the operative condition is not 
some set of new computers or new set of reading materials. The 
operative condition is a culture at the local level which assigns value 
to education and is engaged and is working to improve education. 
Instead of students that were below the 50th percentile, they are now 
operating above the 90th percentile. That is a formula for success 
instead of failure. That's a formula for survival instead of difficulty 
in the next century.
  Here is another example, one from the other end of the country. ``In 
its fourth year of the [partnership] program, the Daniel Webster School 
in Redwood City, CA, shows significant gains in student achievement 
compared to other schools in the district. Webster students have 
increased their average California Test of Basic Skills math scores by 
19 percentile points.'' That means if they were at the 50th percentile 
before the partnership program, they were at the 69th percentile at the 
next testing period. They did this by having a situation in which 
parents were directly and substantially involved. ``In language,'' the 
study continues, ``most classes improved by at least 10 percentile 
points. ``
  What I am really trying to say here is that there is a fundamental 
truth that when local governments and local education officials and 
parents are working together to determine the curriculum and to 
energize student involvement and behavior, they produce success rates 
in school which are literally phenomenal. Remember the first of those 
rates we talked about in Chicago? That was a 50- to 60-percent 
improvement over the other group that had not had as much parental 
involvement in the local program.
  If we take the component of parental energy and parental involvement 
out of our schools by divorcing from local school boards the 
opportunities to shape curricula because we have a national test which 
requires that everyone teach material which will help them survive on 
the next national test, we will have done a grave injustice to the next 
generation. An increase in parent involvement leads to significant 
gains in student academic achievement in virtually every instance.
  Here is one from Mississippi elementary schools. According to a 1993 
report of the Quality Education Program, which is designed to increase 
student success in school by increasing parental involvement, student 
success was strengthened in seven school districts in Mississippi in 
1989. Between the 1988-89 school year, which was before the program was 
implemented, and the 1990-1991 school year, the 27 participating 
schools, which serve 16,000 elementary school students, showed a 4.5-
percent increase in test scores over control schools. So, just 
implementing a program for increasing parental involvement resulted in 
a very important increase in test scores in Mississippi. That program 
provided, of course, a number of ways to engage parents in the process 
of being involved in schools.

  I think it is a real, serious threat to parental involvement, local 
control and a community and culture which cares about education when we 
say we are going to take the fundamental decisions about what is taught 
and how it is taught out of local hands and we are going to put it into 
the hands of bureaucrats in Washington, DC, who operate under a third 
level wing of the U.S. Department of Education, individuals appointed 
by the Secretary of Education but really accountable to no one.
  Even our U.S. Department of Education stated, in a 1994 report, that 
``when families are involved in their children's education in positive 
ways, children achieve grades and test scores, have better attendance 
at school, complete more homework, and demonstrate more positive 
attitudes and behavior.'' That sounds like the ultimate in what you 
could want. Here you have children who achieve higher grades and test 
scores, have better attendance, they complete more homework and they 
demonstrate more positive attitudes and behavior. How do you get that? 
You engage parents and the local community in building a culture which 
reinforces student achievement.
  Sadly, Federal testing takes away local control and parental 
involvement. Education should be focused at the local level, where 
parents, teachers, and school boards can have the greatest opportunity 
to be involved in the development of school curricula and testing. The 
Federal Government should not impose its will on teachers, parents and 
school boards about the education of their children. We should not have 
a dumbed-down national curriculum imposed through the back door of a 
national test. There are ways to test. There are ways to test at the 
local level. There are ways to compare local achievement to the 
performance of individuals in other districts and across the Nation. 
There are tests which are given across the Nation on a voluntary basis. 
The Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the Stanford test, and a number of other 
tests are developed by private agencies. But they don't impose 
curriculum because they are selected at the option of the schools.
  The hallmark of the education proposals being considered by the 
Congress, rather than being proposed by the President, is a hallmark of 
local control and parental involvement. Look at the things that we have 
been discussing in the U.S. Congress. We have discussed the idea of 
scholarships for District of Columbia school children, giving parents 
more choice and more opportunity for assigning their students to 
schools that are productive and schools that are helpful to their 
children. That is empowering parents. It is putting parents in the 
driver's seat instead of the nickel seats. I believe we want parents in 
those front seats.
  We have proposed education block grants, which send dollars to the 
classroom instead of the bureaucracy and move decisions from Washington 
to the local school districts. The Senate of the United States voted 
not long ago to send the resources to the States, where the money could 
be invested in classrooms, where the money could be invested in 
teachers, where the money could be provided to make a real difference 
rather than to say that the power would be somehow drawn to Washington, 
DC, or somehow provided to bureaucrats in some part of the Department 
of Education.
  Here is another thing we are considering, A-plus accounts, that allow 
parents to save for their children's education and to make choices on 
spending resources for education.
  Another thing we have been talking about is charter schools, creating 
innovative schools that are run by parents and teachers, not a 
bureaucracy.
  We have had an effort moving schools away from bureaucracy towards 
more parental involvement, more and more active participation, hands-on 
control and engagement by parents. That is the design of what we have 
been talking about in the U.S. Congress. Then the President comes along 
and says no, we need a program where we develop a test nationally. The 
fact of the matter is, if you test nationally you are going to drive 
the curriculum nationally. You have to teach to the test, in order to 
do well on a test. National testing transfers power from parents and 
schools to Washington. It is exactly the opposite of what we are trying 
to accomplish in education.
  States, educators, and scholars all stress the importance of local 
control in education decisions, and many of them stress the dangers of 
losing such local control. Gov. George Allen of Virginia has developed 
widely acclaimed Standards of Learning for English, mathematics, 
science, history and social studies. And he stated the importance of 
educational reform at the grassroots level:

       If there is one important lesson we have learned during our 
     efforts to set clear, rigorous and measurable academic 
     expectations for children in Virginia's public school system, 
     it is that effective education reform occurs at the 
     grassroots local and State level, not at the federal 
     government level.


[[Page S10930]]


  That was in a letter sent to Congressman Goodling on July 29 of this 
year.
  Here is Theodore Sizer, a liberal critic of the national standards 
agenda, who acknowledges that who sets the standard and controls the 
curriculum is crucial. Listen to Ted Sizer, a noted education 
authority:

       The ``who decides'' matter is not a trivial one. Serious 
     education engages the minds and hearts of our youngest, most 
     vulnerable, and most impressionable citizens. The state 
     requires that children attend school under penalty of the 
     law, and this unique power carries with it an exceedingly 
     heavy burden on policymakers to be absolutely clear as to 
     ``who decides'' and why that choice of authority is just. We 
     are dealing here with the fundamental matter of intellectual 
     freedom, the rights of both children and families.
  Who decides? Theodore Sizer asks the question and says it is 
critical. Very few times would we let someone decide what is done who 
is not paying the bill, not footing the tab. I mean, we usually say 
that the person who makes the order gets to select from the menu.
  Local governments and parents and communities pay 92 to 93 percent of 
all the bills for elementary and secondary education in the United 
States. The Federal Government pays about 7 percent. In most settings, 
we would say that the person who is picking up the tab should be able 
to pull the items off the menu to decide what he is getting. But 
through the back door of a national test developed by the Federal 
Government, we are in the position of saying to people, ``Yeah, you're 
going to have to continue with your 93 percent of the cost, but we're 
going to tell you what you have to teach and how you have to teach it; 
we're going to tell you we know better than you do, and we'll be able 
to figure out from a thousand miles away in a conference room in 
Washington what is better for you and your family and your community 
than you will.''
  We have kind of gotten the genius of the democracy inverted. The 
genius of a democracy is not that the Government would impose its 
values on the citizens, it is that the citizens tell Washington what to 
do. I think in this instance, the citizens ought to say to Washington, 
``Wait a second, we are picking up 93 percent of the bill here, we 
should make the decisions and we can make the decisions and we can make 
them effectively. To yield to the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, the 
right to say what is going to be taught and how it is going to be 
taught in our schools, no thank you.'' It would be a disaster. As a 
matter of fact, it has been known and understood to be a bad idea for a 
long time. Nearly 30 years ago, education Professor Harold Hand 
accurately framed the issue when discussing whether the Federal 
Government should institute a national testing program.
  ``The question before us then,'' Professor Hand said, ``is whether 
the national interest would be best served by embarking on a national 
achievement testing program in the public schools at the certain cost 
of relinquishing the principles of states and local control and of 
consent as these now apply to the public schools.''
  He points out clearly that there is a certain cost and the cost is 
giving away your ability to control what is taught and how it is 
taught.
  This is being asked of the American citizens in spite of the fact we 
are going to say you still have to pay for it. ``Ninety-three percent 
of the tab is still going to be yours, but we want to make that 
decision.''
  I don't think there is any question about the fact that national 
tests will lead to a national curriculum. Acting Deputy Secretary of 
Education Michael Smith has said:

       To do well on the national tests, curriculum and 
     instruction would have to change.

  So what we have here is an admission by those who are promoting the 
national test. Their admission is that they would expect to change the 
curriculum and to change instruction in order for people to do well on 
the national test. That is one of the reasons I think the Missouri 
State Teachers Association, made up of 40,000 teachers in the State of 
Missouri, has stated:

       The mere presence of a federal test would create a de facto 
     federal curriculum as teachers and schools adjust their 
     curriculum to ensure that their students perform well on the 
     tests.

  Here you have it, 40,000 classroom teachers from the State of 
Missouri saying, ``Wait a sec, thanks but no thanks. We don't need a 
nationally directed curriculum that disengages the community, that 
disengages the parents, that disengages the local school board, 
principals and teachers and mandates from Washington what to teach and 
how to teach it.''
  Test researchers George Madaus and Thomas Kellaghan point out that 
some advocates for national tests advance the argument that ``a common 
national examination would help create and enforce a common national 
core curriculum,'' and that ``national examinations would give teachers 
clear and meaningful standards to strive for and motivate students to 
work harder by rewarding success and having real consequences for 
failure.''

  What that really means is, if they are giving them a common national 
examination and help enforce a common national core curriculum, then 
the local level is no longer respected. It means that individuals at 
the local level are no longer meaningful. How long can we expect 
parents to stay engaged and to be active participants and to endorse 
and reinforce what their children are doing if the parents are told, 
``No thanks, we don't care for your input, we'll settle this with a 
group of folks behind closed doors in a bureaucracy in Washington, 
DC.''?
  Prof. Harold Hand, speaking on behalf of the Association for 
Supervision and Curriculum Development in opposition to the development 
of national tests, said:

       A national testing program is a powerful weapon for the 
     control of both purposes and content of curriculum, no matter 
     where in the nation children are being taught, and so leads 
     to increasing conformity and restriction in curriculum.

  When President Carter was considering a national test proposed by 
Senator Pell of this body in 1977, here is what Joseph Califano, 
Carter's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, warned--Joseph 
Califano is not thought to be a person who was some kind of iconoclast, 
who was more interested or only interested in States rights, but here 
is what he warned:

       Any set of test questions that the federal government 
     prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a 
     national curriculum.

  That is a substantial statement from a Secretary of Education. He 
goes on to say, and this is striking:

       In its most extreme form--

  These are the words of Joseph Califano, President Carter's Secretary 
of Health, Education and Welfare. He says about a national test:

       In its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is 
     a form of national control of ideas.

  I find that to be a rather striking statement. I don't know whether I 
would go so far as to say that, but I think it is pretty clear that we 
want parents and teachers and community members and local school boards 
to be in charge of what is taught and how it is taught in our local 
schools, especially when they are being asked to pay 93 cents out of 
every dollar committed and devoted to schools. I can't imagine saying 
to the parents, ``You don't matter anymore.'' I really don't like what 
that says to children when we tell them, ``Really, the kind of 
decisions about your future are so important we have to relegate them 
to Government in Washington, DC; we can no longer trust your parents to 
make those kinds of decisions.''
  I think all of us know we want to say to children in their school 
system, ``Respect your parents; there are things you can learn from 
your parents, and if your parents are engaged with you in a partnership 
for learning, your test scores and your achievement will go up and your 
life will have a higher quality.''
  It puzzles me to think that the President of the United States is 
suggesting that we should go to a national testing operation which 
would, as a matter of fact, drive curricula, and begin to take that 
control away from the local governmental entities and deprive parents 
of their participation in the development of educational opportunities 
for their young people.
  There is a fundamental responsibility of our culture to help provide 
a basis through education for the survival of our children in the next 
century. If we do that effectively, we will be successful as a culture. 
But if we destroy the capacity of our young people to do well by 
nationalizing our schools and pulling the rug out from under those who

[[Page S10931]]

would otherwise at the local level be able to make good decisions 
regarding schools and be involved with their children's education, we 
will have done a disservice to this country, not only in this 
generation but in the next.
  H.D. Hoover, the director of the Iowa Basic Skills Testing program, 
has noted:

       There is a whole history of trying to use tests to change 
     curricula, and the record there is not particularly sterling.

  So the point is with the idea of national tests, you drive national 
curriculum. Curriculum is, of course, the fundamental reason for 
school. It is what is being taught, and if we drive and we dislocate 
parents and we take people from the local community out of the 
situation where they can determine what is taught and how it is taught, 
we will have impaired the quality of our schools very, very 
significantly.
  I am not against tests, and I don't want it to be said that I am 
against tests because I don't think you can really have education 
unless you test to see whether or not you make progress.
  There was a time, there was a set of fads that came along that said 
we don't ever test anybody, we just hope they get excited about 
something and learn it and we don't give grades. You remember that. I 
unfortunately missed that. I was graded on almost everything I did.
  But while I was teaching in college--and I spent 5\1/2\ years as an 
associate professor, assistant professor--there were some of these fads 
that came through where students wanted to take things pass-fail; just 
be really vague about our performance here and don't tell anybody 
whether we did well or did poorly.
  Frankly, it was a cover for doing poorly. They would never ask that 
they take a course pass-fail if they thought they were going to do well 
in it. But, of course, they were going to slide by and, of course, 
suggest they take this pass-fail. I don't blame them. That makes sense.
  So I am not against testing. I am in favor of testing. I think you 
can overtest. You can spend all your time testing and do too little 
teaching. You can spend too much resource in testing and too little in 
teaching. But in a balanced program of testing and teaching, providing 
accountability both for teachers and students, and providing 
accountability to the community, I am in favor of that.
  But if you take that accountability and you impose it from a thousand 
miles away by a bureaucracy in Washington, DC, and you render powerless 
the people who are out there on the front lines, and particularly 
parents and school board members, and you basically have what you would 
call a national school board, so that they make the decisions in 
Washington--and the role of the local communities is to put up the 
money, but Washington decides what will be taught and how it will be 
taught--I do not think that really provides the energy and the 
incentive to get the job done well. As a matter of fact, I think it 
would be a disaster.
  It is kind of interesting. A few years ago we had a rush to impose 
national standards. I may talk about that a little bit later. People 
rejected national standards because they were afraid there would be a 
change in curriculum based on national standards. Well, that is kind of 
interesting.
  Terrance Paul of the Institute of Academic Excellence, has stated it 
this way:

       Standards don't cause change.  . . . Tests with 
     consequences cause change.

  Of course, some people may say, ``Well, the President wants to give 
this test, but there won't be any consequence.'' Well, why give the 
test? Frankly, we want something from our testing --and testing time is 
a precious resource--we should use it effectively. We should use it at 
the local level to test, to see whether or not we are achieving what we 
want to do at the local level.
  And to take that precious resource and to fill it up with tests from 
the national level, that you say will not have any consequence, makes 
little sense. And to use resources--it costs to make tests.
  The President's program, all told, is to be in the $50 to $60 million 
range to develop tests for reading and mathematics. I think I could 
develop a test to see if people could add, subtract, and multiply and 
divide, and if they could read for a little less than that. Be that as 
it may, I am not one of those that would be on this national testing 
development group that the President has suggested.
  The important thing is that no one should devise a test for the local 
community unless the local community asks for it. A local community has 
a great opportunity to purchase tests and to deploy tests, administer 
tests that are either developed at the local level or developed by some 
nationally known, well-reputed testing agency in the United States, 
like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or some other analogous or similar 
organization.

  There are a number of States--48 as a matter of fact--that have 
developed or are developing State standards and State tests. To switch 
in midcourse from these would have a disruptive impact on those State 
tests and State standards, because you are going to have to teach to 
the national test if we have a national test.
  Teaching to that test will pull the rug out from under teaching that 
is designed to prepare individuals for the tests at the State level by 
supplanting or superseding State and school district efforts. A 
national test will undercut their efforts and impose a one-size-fits-
all system.
  I have a little story I like to tell about one size fits all, because 
I think one size fits all is one of the greatest ruses in history. It 
is a joke. If you were to order pajamas for your family out of a 
catalog that says, ``one size fits all''--and for all five members of 
mine, if you were to send the same set, I guarantee you that we would 
rename ``one size fits all'' to ``one size fits none.''
  The value of this country is that we have a lot of different 
approaches to things. It is a major strength of this country. What 
would happen, for instance, if we were to take our computer industry--
just an industry, for example--and decide that we were going to test 
all the computers in the same way, that they all had to have the same 
thing in them, they all have to meet the very same standards?
  We would end up without competition, first of all. And we would end 
up without improvement because once people learned what the test was 
going to be, they would teach to that test and everybody would be 
uniform. We would not want it in industry. And we would not want it in 
automotives because we know that when people compete and they do what 
works best for them, we get the kind of energy in the economy and get 
the energy in our culture that provides for improvement.
  Problems that would result from a national test are a national 
curriculum or national education standards. The National Assessment of 
Education Progress' science tests results show how the test can drive 
curriculum. Here is an article from today's Washington Post.

       Still, Education Secretary Richard W. Riley cautioned that 
     the results may not be as dismal as they first seem. Student 
     scores in science have improved substantially since the early 
     1980s, he said, and many schools are revamping how they teach 
     the subject.

  He said that revamping it, because of the new science test that the 
national group put out, that they went down in performance and they 
went against the trend that they had been going up in.
  So we had a trend during the early 1980's of going up. Now they come 
out with a new test and they do not do well. And the Secretary of 
Education says, ``Well, they'll do better on the new test because 
they'll start teaching to this test.''

  Well, first of all, if they were doing well on the other tests--or 
better--I wonder if we want to change and mandate the change through 
this curriculum or through a curriculum change that is imposed by this 
test, the National Assessment of Education Progress, the NAEP, test, 
which was in the paper today.
  The scores were reported yesterday by the National Assessment 
Governing Board. ``Education officials said the latest test results 
present stark new evidence of a problem in how science is being 
taught.'' They brought out a new test and they found out students did 
poorly on the new test. So they said: ``Well, we have got to change how 
things are being taught. Too many schools, they contend, still 
emphasize

[[Page S10932]]

rote memorization of facts instead of creative exercises that would 
arouse more curiosity in science and make the subject more relevant to 
students.''
  This whole endeavor suggests that they intend to shape how things are 
taught from the education bureaucracy. And they admit that that is the 
way change will take place.
  In discussing proposed changes to the National Assessment of 
Education Progress, back in 1991, Madaus and Kellaghan described the 
danger caused by the momentum of instituting a national test. Here is 
their quote.

       Current efforts to change the character of [the National 
     Assessment of Educational Progress] carry a clear lesson 
     regarding the future of any national testing system. That is, 
     testing and assessment are technologies.  . . . Further, the 
     history of technology shows us that ``Once a process of 
     technological development has been set in motion, it proceeds 
     largely by its own momentum irrespective of the intentions of 
     its originators.''

  What it means is you put a test in place, and people have to teach to 
that test. It develops a momentum of its own. And we are seeing that 
confessed in today's Washington Post. Students have been going up in 
their science evaluation, and the National Assessment of Educational 
Progress program comes in with a new type of science exam that says, 
``We don't care what you know, we want to find out different things 
about how creative you might be.'' And they all of a sudden say that 
the science performance falls off because they do not want to know what 
students have learned, they want to know how curious they are.
  I think it is important for us to do more than develop curiosity in 
students. It is important for us to develop learning in students. And 
the previous tests were showing that learning was taking place and the 
test scores were going up. So they changed the test, redirected the 
objective from learning to curiosity. And when it shows that they are 
not as curious as they wanted them to be, they say, ``Well, we're just 
changing the curriculum by keeping and giving this test over and over 
again, and pretty soon we will have curious students, although they 
may be ignorant of the kinds of facts we would want them to know.''

  This is a serious problem. Experts point out that Great Britain's 
attempt to provide a national exam ``with a wide-achievement span seems 
to have been unsuccessful, not only in the case of lower-achieving 
students but is reported . . . to have lowered the standards of the 
higher-achieving students.''
  These experts, Madaus and Kellaghan, point out that in Great Britain 
the attempt to provide a national exam with wide achievement span, 
meaning over broad areas, seems to have been unsuccessful not only in 
lower-achieving students--meaning that lower-achieving students are not 
doing better because of the exam--but also it is saw the standards of 
higher-achieving students go down.
  This is a lose-lose situation. It would be one thing if we were able 
to pull up the guys at the bottom at the cost of the guys at the top, 
maybe losing some, but this says that when you have these broad exams 
in Great Britain, not only do the people at the bottom do worse, the 
people at the top do worse.
  In assessing the Educate America program in their 1991 report, these 
same experts dispel the argument that a national test would not lead to 
a national curriculum:

       Educate America claims that their national test would not 
     result in a national curriculum since it would only delineate 
     what all students should know and what skills they should 
     possess before they complete secondary school but would not 
     prescribe how schools should teach. This assertion is 
     disingenuous [according to the experts]. European schools 
     have national curricula but do not prescribe how schools 
     should teach. Through a tradition of past tests, however, 
     national tests de facto constitute a curriculum and funnel 
     teaching and learning along the fault lines of the test. Two 
     acronyms describe what inevitably happens: WYTFIWYG--what you 
     teach for is what you get--and HYTIHYT--how you test is how 
     you teach.

  If you are going to test for something, that is what you end up 
teaching.
  These experts indicate that all over the continent of Europe, when 
you nationalize the testing you nationalize the curriculum.
  Dr. Bert Green, professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University 
notes:

       The strategy seems to be to build a test that represents 
     what the students should know, so that teaching to the test 
     becomes teaching the curriculum that is central to student 
     achievement.

  A nationalized curriculum dislocates parents. It sets them out of the 
operation, along with other members of the local community. They no 
longer have an influence on the central core of what a school is about, 
that is, what is taught and how it is taught. And once that is done, I 
think we make a very serious inroad into the potential for student 
achievement.
  Lyle V. Jones, a research professor in psychology at the University 
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, fears that efforts to recast 
classroom curricula will focus simply on teaching what will likely 
produce higher scores on national tests. Let me quote Professor Jones: 
``The pressures to teach what is being tested are bound to be very 
large and hard to resist,'' he said, ``Particularly in schools where 
the teachers and principals know the results will be published, the 
focus will be on getting kids to perform well on the test rather than 
meeting a richer set of standards in mathematics learning.''
  Marc F. Bernstein, superintendent of the Bellmore-Merrick central 
high school district in Seattle, worries that a national test will lead 
to a national curriculum. Here is what he said:

       I know that the president has not recommended a national 
     curriculum, only national testing, but educators know all too 
     well that ``what is tested will be taught.''

  The point here is the choice. Someone will decide what is tested; 
someone will decide what is taught; someone will decide how it is 
taught. Will it be a group of individuals made up of parents, teachers, 
business people, community officials, who want a local school board to 
have a sensitivity to what is happening in the local school, and when 
something goes wrong can try something else, can mediate a problem? Or 
will it be a group of individuals in Washington, DC, in some conference 
room in the Department of Education, inaccessible, who do not pay the 
bill but who will impose a national curriculum that is not correctable 
at the local level when it flops, when it does not work, when it fails 
students, when it fails the community but still is enshrined in either 
the egos or in the minds or in the theories of people 1,000 miles or 
2,000 miles away?
  That is the question. It is simple. And I think we do not want to 
develop some backdoor entry to a national curriculum. These experts, 
expert after expert that I have been quoting, they say that if you 
develop the test, you develop the curriculum, you specify the 
curriculum.
  The superintendent of the Bellmore-Merrick central high school 
district in Seattle says:

       I know that the president has not recommended a national 
     curriculum, only national testing, but educators know all too 
     well that ``what is tested will be taught.''

  President Clinton remarked on May 23, 1997, at an Education Town Hall 
meeting--these are the words of the President:

       The tests are designed so that if they don't work out so 
     well the first time, you'll know what to do to teach, to 
     improve and lift these standards.

  Let me read that again. This is a quote from the President of the 
United States.

       The tests are designed so that if they don't work out so 
     well the first time, you'll know what to do to teach, to 
     improve and lift these standards.

  Basically, you will know, says the President, to change your 
curriculum. You will know how to teach differently. You will know how 
to remove the opportunity to decide curriculum from the local level and 
forfeit it to those who make the test in Washington, DC.
  The Association for Childhood Education International notes, ``What 
we are seeing is a growing understanding that teaching to tests 
increasingly has become the curriculum in many schools.''
  William Mehrens, Michigan State College of Education Professor, has 
noted that one major concern about standardized achievement tests is 
that when test scores are used to make important decisions, teachers 
may teach to the test too directly. Although teaching to the test is 
not a new concern, today's greater emphasis on teacher accountability 
can make this practice more likely to occur.

[[Page S10933]]

  While basic skills are the most important thing for kids to learn, 
the proposed national tests contain high-risk educational philosophies 
and fads. It would be one thing if we thought the test would work or 
this test would help us get to the basics. I am afraid that they do not 
hold such promise.
  John Dossey, chairman of the President's math panel to develop the 
math test, served on the 1989 National Council of Teachers of 
Mathematics group that criticized American schools' ``long-standing 
preoccupation with computation and other traditional skills.'' We have 
been too long preoccupied with addition, subtraction, multiplication 
and division. He is saying teaching kids the multiplication tables--
whether 12 times 12 is 144 or 15 times 15 is 225, or 6 times 7--
demonstrates our ``long-standing preoccupation with computation and 
other traditional skills.''
  I believe that is what we need in our schools. We need to teach young 
people to be able to multiply, subtract, add, divide. His focus on what 
advocates call ``whole math'' would teach our children that the right 
answer to basic math tables are not as important as an ability to 
justify incorrect ones, to argue about incorrect ones. The ability to 
add, subtract, multiply and divide should be replaced, it seems, by 
calculator skills in students. These are ``whole math'' individuals, 
the people who want to start students with calculators so they are 
never encumbered by the responsibility of learning addition, 
subtraction, multiplication, and division. They can always do it on a 
calculator.
  The proposed math test is steeped in the new, unproven ``whole math'' 
or ``fuzzy math'' philosophy, deemed by some as ``MTV math,'' which 
encourages students to rely on calculators and discourages arithmetic 
skills and has resulted in a decline in math performance.
  Now, this is the sort of approach to mathematics taken by a group 
that the President has had working on these exams for quite some time--
he has spent millions of dollars in trying to develop this, and we have 
talked about this previously. The last meeting convened at the Four 
Seasons Hotel here in Washington, DC. Their approach to mathematics is 
similar to this ``new-new math'' or the ``fuzzy math'' or ``MTV math,'' 
depending on how you characterize it.
  This fad was tried, unfortunately, on our Defense Department 
dependent students. The Defense Department has to operate schools all 
over the world in order to make it possible for the dependents, the 
children of people who work in our defense operation around the world, 
to get an education. Here is what happened when they implemented this 
program in the Defense Department schools. The median percentile 
computation scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills taken by 
more than 37,000 Department of Defense dependent students one year 
after the Defense Department introduced whole math dropped 14 percent 
for third graders, 20 percent for fourth graders, 20 percent for fifth 
graders, 17 percent for sixth graders--this is not a laughing matter--
17 percent for seventh graders and only 8.5 percent for eighth graders.
  Now, that is the whole math, that is the new-new math or the fuzzy 
math. That is the kind of math that they want to test for in the new 
national test. It means you will have to be teaching it in order to 
survive on the test, and if we reorient the curriculum of this country 
across America to the so-called new math or fuzzy math woe be unto our 
ability in the next century for our young people to be able to make 
simple calculations.

  These are the folks who say that calculation is not important, we 
have been too long focused on calculation. I disagree as totally as I 
could with the statement that we have been too focused on calculation. 
I think the average parents in America know we have not focused enough 
on teaching kids to add, subtract, multiply and divide. We have not 
overdone it. The fact we are in trouble in terms of mathematic or 
arithmetic literacy in this country indicates we have not focused on 
computation of skills, not that we have.
  Five hundred mathematicians from around the Nation have written a 
letter to President Clinton describing the flaws in the proposed math 
test. They say that the committee members who developed the test relied 
on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards, which 
represents only one point of view of math and has raised concerns from 
mathematicians and professional associations. No. 2 in their concerns, 
the test failed to test basic computation skills.
  The President said we want to have a national test, and the math 
teachers, 500 of them, took a look and said, wait a second, these tests 
fail to test basic computational skills under the assumption that all 
the students will know these things already. I think that would be a 
tragedy to try to drive a curriculum, try to test under the assumption 
everybody knows how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, so you give 
everybody a calculator in the test.
  One California parent's 11th grade daughter, who was in the whole 
math curriculum in a local district there, was diagnosed as having 
second-grade math skills. The mother panicked and got a teacher and 
began to teach at home what would not be taught in the schools. Parents 
in Illinois were advised to let their son work with a school 
counselor--and here is the reason they were told to do so--because ``he 
values correct and complete answers too much.'' I think counseling is 
indicated in a situation like that--but it is not for the student. 
There should be some counseling that goes on for the so-called 
educators.
  Lynne Cheney, former chairman of the National Endowment for the 
Humanities, who, incidentally, tried to develop a national set of 
history standards and found out how difficult it was and how 
inappropriate it would be to try to impose the proposed standards on 
the students, has become an opponent of national standards and national 
tests. She wrote in the Wall Street Journal not long ago about Steven 
Leinwand, who sits on the President's math panel. Leinwand had written 
an essay, explaining why it is ``downright dangerous'' to teach 
students things like 6 times 7 is 42, put down the 2 and carry the 4. 
Simple multiplication. Such instruction sorts people out, Mr. Leinwand 
writes, ``anointing the few'' who master these procedures and ``casting 
out the many.''
  Now we have people who are developing the national test who have such 
a low view of the talent pool in America that they say only a few 
students can learn 6 times 7 is 42, put down the 2 and carry 4. That 
kind of low understanding and low evaluation of America's future is not 
what we need in designing a curriculum through the back door of a 
national test. It is just that simple.
  Students all over the world have arithmetic literacy. They have the 
capacity to compute fundamentally. They have the fundamental capacity 
to do arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. 
And to say that only a few could do it in the United States and is to 
undervalue our most important resource--that's the students who will 
make up the population of this great country.
  I have to say this. If we have very, very low expectations of 
students, that will drive the levels at which they produce. There are 
books full of studies that say, if you have low expectations, you get 
low output; if you have high expectations, you get much better 
performance. Let's not turn this country over to a group of individuals 
who think that most American students are simply incapable of learning 
6 times 7 is 42, put down the 2 and carry the 4.

  I was pleased to have an opportunity to speak with the Senator from 
West Virginia here earlier this afternoon. Senator Byrd made a speech 
in June of 1997, a speech on a whole math textbook called Focus on 
Algebra. After looking at the textbook, he called it ``whacko 
algebra.'' We have his entire speech. It is an interesting speech in 
which he points out some of the real problems we have with this 
approach. He says:

       A closer look at the current approach to mathematics in our 
     schools reveals something called the ``new-new math.'' 
     Apparently the concept behind this new-new approach to 
     mathematics is to get kids to enjoy mathematics and hope that 
     ``enjoyment'' will lead to a better understanding of basic 
     math concepts. Nice thought, but nice thoughts do not always 
     get the job done. Recently Marianne Jennings, a professor at 
     Arizona State University, found that her teenage daughter 
     could not solve a mathematical equation. This was all the 
     more puzzling because her daughter was getting an A in 
     algebra. Curious about the disparity, Jennings

[[Page S10934]]

     took a look at her daughter's Algebra textbook, 
     euphemistically titled ``Secondary Math: An Integrated 
     Approach: Focus on Algebra.'' . . . After reviewing it, 
     Jennings dubbed it ``Rain Forest Algebra.''

  I think the Senator may have been right when he said, ``I have to go 
a step further and call it whacko algebra.''
  If that is the kind of new-new math, if that is the kind of whole 
math that this national test would impose upon citizens across this 
country and would literally say to individuals, ``This is what we will 
test, and you will have to take this test and you will be wanting to 
teach to this test,'' I think it is a terrible disservice to the next 
generation.
  Now, the President has not only indicated he wants to have a 
mathematics test or a test of arithmetic or skills in that area, he 
wants to have a reading test. What I fear about tests is that they not 
only drive what is taught but they drive how it is taught. How you 
teach reading makes a tremendous difference in terms of your capacity 
in your life-long endeavor with the written word. Of course, we know 
that being able to read instructions and being able to read things is 
far more important than it has ever been in history. One philosophy for 
teaching reading is what is called the ``whole language approach,'' 
which doesn't really focus on phonics.
  One of the real advantages of the English language is that we have 
letters. There are some languages that do not have letters. They just 
have pictures. Some of the Oriental languages just have pictures, and 
the picture, if you have never seen it before, really can't tell you 
how to pronounce it. It won't tell you what it might mean. It won't 
give you many clues of how to look it up because it is just a picture. 
If you don't recognize it, you don't recognize it.
  With English, on the other hand, if you understand it phonetically, 
you look at it and you know that there are certain sounds that are 
associated with certain letters and combinations of letters. As you 
sound words out, it also provides a pretty easy way to look it up 
because we have the ability to have the dictionary and it is in 
alphabetical order. There is an order. There is a logic to phonetically 
understanding the English language. It is the capacity to take the 
language, a word you have never seen before, sound it out, and 
deconstruct the word and figure out what it means.
  I think it would be a tremendous disaster if, instead of allowing 
schools to decide how they want to teach English, if we were to have a 
test constructed and from that test drive an approach to teaching 
English, for instance, that ignored phonics.
  Now, I have to say this, and I have said it before, and I guess I 
will be saying it many times: I don't think we ought to have a national 
test even if it were one that I thought perfectly represented what 
ought to be taught. The point I think we have to understand is that 
parents deserve the right to shape the curriculum and the way it is 
taught at the local level. When parents have that right and can be 
involved in it, they are far more likely to be engaged in the 
educational effort and we go back to our primary understanding that 
when parents are involved in the education effort, students' 
achievements skyrocket. The whole purpose of education is not for 
teachers. It is not for school boards. It is not for parents. The 
purpose of education is for students. We should be doing those things 
which drive student achievement and performance, and parental 
involvement in the system drives student achievement and performance. 
Now, the President of the United States has come before the American 
people and he has said that the test would be voluntary. He says that 
these are going to be voluntary. Well, frankly, he wants everybody to 
pay for the tests. So you have to pay for them whether you would use 
them or not. I think if he really wanted them voluntary, he would say, 
if you don't use the test, you could get the money that would be spent 
if you did use the test to do other things. So a school district that 
had plenty of tests and knew what its weak points were and how it 
wanted to advance the interest of its students could spend the money on 
something worthwhile to them from what they already knew. Most good 
school districts know where they are weak and where they are strong and 
they know what they need to do.

  The President said, though, this is going to be a voluntary test, you 
don't have to worry. Don't worry about a test that drives curriculum 
all over the country and makes it uniform and monotonous and dumbs down 
things to a single, low common denominator on the national level, 
because that won't happen. ``This is a voluntary test.'' That is the 
line, that is the statement, that is the oft-repeated sales pitch of 
the Department of Education. However, it is pretty clear that that is 
really not their intention. While the President has stated that it will 
be voluntary, and clearly indicated that in his remarks in the State of 
the Union message, he went to Michigan on March 10, 1997, just a couple 
months later, and said, ``I want to create a climate in which no one 
can say no.''
  So much for your voluntary test. The President says he wants the test 
to be voluntary, but he goes to Michigan and says, ``I want to create a 
climate in which no one can say no, in which it's voluntary but you are 
ashamed if you don't give your kids the chance to do [these tests].'' I 
really think we need to get an understanding of whether this is 
voluntary or not. I think when you open the backdoor through national 
testing to the development of national curriculum and you displace the 
capacity of parents, teachers, school board members, and community 
members to develop what they want taught and how they want it taught, 
and to correct it when mistakes are being made at the local level, 
displace that with a national system of tests that directs curriculum 
and say they will be voluntary so there is not a problem, but then you 
go to Michigan and say you want to create a climate in which no one can 
say no, I will guarantee you that you properly raise suspicion on the 
part of the American people.
  When the President of the United States decides what is voluntary and 
what is not voluntary and he tells you in one instance he wants it to 
be voluntary, but in another instance ``no one can say no,'' you have 
to consider the fact that the President has a lot of power, a lot of 
resources and a lot of money, a lot of grants, and other things that 
are available to the President through his department. He can say, oh, 
that is one of those school districts that decided they didn't need our 
testing system. You know, that indicates they are not very progressive, 
so they should not be able to participate in this, that, or the other 
thing. Or we certainly would not want to favor them with a visit from 
governmental leadership from the executive branch--or any number of 
things. The President himself says, ``I want to create a climate in 
which no one can say no.''
  Now, I have heard about choices where no one can say no, and I have 
heard about people who were so attractive that no one could say no. But 
I don't think we want to create a situation or a circumstance in 
education where we have a nationally driven, federally developed test 
by bureaucrats in Washington, to which no one can say no. William 
Safire talked about the ``nose of the camel under the tent.'' He wrote, 
``We're only talking about math and English, say the national standard-
bearers, and shucks, it's only voluntary.'' Safire said this: ``Don't 
believe that; if the nose of that camel gets under the tent, the hump 
of a national curriculum, slavish teaching to the homogenizing tests, 
and a black market in answers would surely follow.''

  It sounds to me like he has listened to what the President said in 
Michigan. Voluntary? Hardly. It is the nose of the camel, and a 
nationalized, federalized curriculum--a Federal Government curriculum 
will follow. If a State chooses to administer the tests, all local 
educational agencies and parents will not have a choice whether they 
want to participate. The truth of the matter is that this is the 
dislocation of parents, school boards, and communities, and it is 
investing power in Washington, DC, in a new bureaucracy to control 
curriculum and testing across the country.
  Other Federal ``voluntary'' plans have ended up becoming mandatory. A 
Missouri State Teachers Association memo says: ``Experience in dealing 
with federal programs has taught us to be wary. For example, the 55 mph 
speed limit was voluntary, too--on paper, at

[[Page S10935]]

any rate. In practice, the speed limit was universally adopted because 
federal highway funds were contingent upon states' `voluntary' 
cooperation. The point is that what is voluntary often becomes 
mandatory when you have federal programs and funds involved.''
  The Department of Education stated in a September 16 memorandum that 
it is willing to use the leverage of Title I funds to gain acceptance 
for the proposed national tests--Federal funds linked to the proposed 
national tests. Voluntary? Hardly.
  The memo says that the Federal agency will accept the national tests 
as an adequate assessment of the proficiency of Title I/educationally 
disadvantaged funds. This offer is totally inappropriate. It 
demonstrates how desperate the Department is to gain acceptance for 
these flawed Federal tests. Use of the tests is being linked directly 
with Federal funds. Today, the use of the tests for Title I students is 
``permitted,'' or suggested, perhaps even encouraged. It is only a 
matter of time before it could be required.
  An October 1990 study from the Ohio Legislative Office for Education 
Oversight revealed that 173 of the 330 forms, 52 percent of the forms, 
used by a school district were related to participation in a Federal 
program, while Federal programs provide less than 5 percent of 
education funding.
  Here is what we have already. We have a National Government that is 
intrusive. It is responsible for more than half of the paperwork load 
that teachers are struggling under, and that school officials are 
struggling under, which displaces resources that might otherwise go to 
the classroom. So you have 52 percent of the paperwork at the Federal 
level and only 5 percent of the funding, according to the 1990 Ohio 
Legislative Office of Education Oversight. I don't think we need 
additional invasion by Federal bureaucrats to displace what ought to be 
done, which can be done, what is being done and can be done far more 
successfully at the local level with a Federal bureaucracy.
  What happened when we tried this through a Federal bureaucracy in the 
past? What has been our success at imposing things we thought might be 
good? It is kind of interesting to look at the so-called ``National 
Standards for United States History,'' which were assembled in hopes of 
providing some sort of standard for history teaching. These standards 
were funded in 1991 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and 
the Department of Education for just over $2 million.
  Here is what we got for our $2 million. If you think you want to 
invite the National Government in a bureaucracy, through a test, to 
begin to develop a curriculum and to set standards that have to be 
followed in every district, think about what happened to this effort to 
develop national standards. The National Standards for United States 
History do not mention Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere's midnight ride, and 
did not mention the Wright Brothers or Thomas Edison. Who made the 
grade with the revisionists, the educationists, the liberals who wanted 
to rewrite history? Well, Mansa Musa, a 14th century African king, and 
the Indian chief Speckled Snake had prominent display--but not these 
others. I would not be against adding some people to our history books, 
but I am against deleting the Wright Brothers and Robert E. Lee. The 
American Federation of Labor was mentioned nine times, and the KKK was 
mentioned over a dozen times. It was obviously an attempt to set 
standards that would make students ashamed of their country instead of 
giving them an awareness of what their country was all about.

  Lynne Cheney criticized the National Standards for U.S. History, in 
spite of the fact that she was the chairperson of the National 
Endowment for the Humanities when the Endowment contributed to the 
funding for the standards project. She said that the U.S. history 
standards were politically biased. She cited a participant in the 
process who said the standards sought to be ``politically correct.'' 
What a tragedy that we would take an effort to our classroom that we 
were trying to make politically correct and impose that instead of the 
truth to people about our history. Cheney also said that the standards 
slighted or ignored many central figures in U.S. history, particularly 
white males. The standards were uncritical in their discussions of 
other societies. The standards were unduly critical of capitalism. The 
economic system, which has carried the United States into a position 
where it is the best place in the world to be poor, not the best place 
to be rich. You can get richer in some other place, but the poor of 
America are better off than the rich in many places around the world. 
But, no, the standards were unduly critical of capitalism, so writes 
Lynne Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities at the 
time it funded this effort to build standards. In testimony before a 
subcommittee of the House Economic and Educational Opportunities 
Committee, she reiterated concerns about the history standards and 
concluded that national standards were not needed in any subject area, 
much less any entity to certify or approve them.
  So that is what Lynne Cheney, who had experience with national 
standards, said when they tried a bureaucracy in Washington to dictate 
a history standard. She said it was a failure. She spent our money 
doing it, but she had the courage to stand up and say it ended up with 
a bunch of politically correct stuff that was inappropriate to use as 
teaching tools for our children.
  Finally, George Will attacked the failed history standards as 
``cranky, anti-Americanism.''
  The English/language arts standards were such an ill-considered 
muddle that even the Clinton Department of Education cut off funding 
for them after having invested more than $1 million dollars. Over and 
over again, when there have been national efforts to establish 
standards, create curriculum, to develop tests, they have to suspend 
the effort because they get bogged down in politically correct 
language, they get bogged down in the compromise of politics and end up 
not speaking to the students' real needs, which is for education.
  Can you imagine a politically driven math test that is not concerned 
about computing--adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing--but is 
concerned about making sure that we don't offend anybody? Frankly, we 
need to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. To say that it 
doesn't matter whether you get the right number, that if you just get 
close, sounds a little bit too much like Washington, where people 
around here mumble ``close enough for Government work.'' Well, if you 
are having your appendix taken out or you are having your teeth filled 
by a dentist, you hope they would not have that attitude toward 
mathematics or anything else. There are a lot of things that are 
relative in the world, I suppose. But one thing is not--we ought to be 
able to say to people that 2 plus 2 equals 4, and 2 plus 3 doesn't. It 
is hard to say to students that there are any absolutes left in the 
culture, but at least we ought to be able to say to them there are some 
absolutes. You can find them, at least, in the mathematics curriculum.
  Well, USA Today reported that according to Boston College's Center 
for Study of Testing, children are already overtested, taking between 
three and nine standardized tests a year. The truth of the matter is, 
States and communities are already testing students. They are keenly 
aware of the need to improve performance, and to subject students to a 
national test on top of the testing that is already being done is to 
basically impose a resource allocation judgment by the Federal 
Government on the people who are at the State level and at the local 
level, who know how much testing is appropriate. Can you imagine that 
the State and local folks have been testing too little purposely for a 
long time in hopes that there would someday be a Federal test arrive 
which could take a day of their activities, or 2 days of their 
activities, and take resources and funding away from the teaching 
curriculum and add it to the testing curriculum? No, I don't think that 
is the case.
  I think we have been having teachers and school officials deciding 
how much testing is appropriate, testing that amount, making sure that 
they had tests that could compare them to relevant groups.
  We talked at the beginning of my remarks today, and that was some 
time ago, about school districts that have moved up dramatically 
compared to

[[Page S10936]]

the national average. National averages are available today and 
international averages are available today. As a matter of fact, when 
we went to the Washington Post to talk about the new science results in 
the United States, we found out that we fell against international 
averages. We fell in large measure because we decided we would test for 
something else instead of testing for the hard science that the 
international averages are involved with.
  If there is in this proposal for national testing--and obviously it 
is the one that is now being debated between the House and the Senate 
in the conference committee--a proposed national body which would 
develop a national Federal test with the Federal Government directing 
it through the Department of Education, it is important to note that 
this is still going to be Government. They may say that it is 
independent. It is not. It is the National Assessment Governing Board 
which would continue to get Federal appropriations for all of its 
activities through the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm 
of the U.S. Department of Education. This board, although it would have 
Governors and some local officials on it, would be a limited group of 
people that would operate in Washington, DC, under the direction and 
control of the Department of Education.
  The Secretary of Education would still make final decisions on all 
board appointments. The Assistant Secretary for the Federal Office of 
Education Research and Improvement would still exert influence as an ex 
officio member of the National Assessment Governing Board.
  While the House voted overwhelmingly by a vote of 295 to 125 to not 
allow one cent to go for national testing, the Senate-passed proposal 
would provide a new assessment governing board which would add a 
Governor, two industrialists, four members of the public and remove 
five individuals who are currently members of the board. But it would 
still operate in the U.S. Department of Education under the National 
Center for Education Statistics. The Secretary of Education would still 
make final decisions on all board appointments. The Assistant Secretary 
would be the person who drove the ship as an ex officio member of the 
board and as, obviously, a representative of the Department through 
which all the funding would flow.
  Now, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, part 
of Goals 2000, was repealed April 26, 1996, a little over a year and a 
half ago, over concerns that it would function as a national school 
board, establishing Federal standards and driving local curriculum. I 
think it is fair to say that we had good judgment there. We said, wait 
a second, we don't want something that establishes a national 
curriculum, that establishes national standards. We saw how bad that 
was with the history standards. The history standards were repudiated 
unanimously by the Senate because they were just politically correct 
items that were revisionist history, designed, as I said, to make 
students ashamed of the country rather than to inform students about 
the country. And at the time the National Education Standards and 
Improvement Council was repealed, because there were concerns it would 
function as a national school board, it was said on this floor that 
``it is logical to presume that once a national standard has been set 
and defined by some group which has received the imprimatur of the 
Federal Government, you will see that standard is aggressively used as 
a club to force local curriculums to comply with the national standards 
* * * it was a mistake to set up the national school board, NESIC.''
  Well, if it was a mistake to set up a national school board under the 
nomenclature of an education standards and improvement council, it is a 
mistake to establish a national school board under the label of a test 
development committee.

  It was further said in the Chamber that ``the National Education 
Standards and Improvement Council should never have been proposed in 
the first place. It was a mistake and we should terminate it right now. 
The Federal Government does not have a role in this area, and it 
certainly should not be putting taxpayers' dollars at risk in this 
area.''
  Well, if that was a mistake in 1996, where they had no authority to 
propose a national test to be imposed on every student in America to 
drive curriculum, it is certainly a mistake now. And the number of 
letters or the identity of the letters which label the federal 
bureaucracy doesn't change the facts.
  A single national test for students was rejected by the only 
congressionally authorized body ever to make recommendations on 
national testing. The National Council on Education Standards and 
Testing was authorized in 1992 by the Congress, and its final report 
concluded that ``the system assessment must consist of multiple methods 
of measuring progress, not a single test.''
  Whether you allow test development and implementation through the 
Department of Education or through the National Assessment Governing 
Board, the fatal flaw is that we would be allowing the development of a 
test which would drive curriculum. When you drive curriculum from 
Washington and you make it impossible for people at the local level to 
decide what they want taught and how they want it taught and you 
deprive them of the ability to correct mistakes--if it is not working, 
they can't change it because it is all driven from the national level--
you are forfeiting a great opportunity to make the kind of progress 
educationally which will make those who follow us survivors and 
succeeders.
  As I said when I had the opportunity to begin making these remarks, 
the genius of America is bound up in our ability to hand to the next 
century, the next generation, a set of opportunities as great as ours. 
I firmly believe we have that opportunity and we have the 
responsibility to make sure that the next century is characterized by 
individuals who are capable. If we decide to spoil that opportunity by 
ruining our education system with a one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down 
curriculum that is driven by national, federalized testing that comes 
as a result of a bureaucratic organization in Washington that could 
only honestly be labeled as a national school board, we will have 
failed in our responsibility to protect the future of the young people 
in this country.
  Some have concluded that the public is demanding what the President 
says he wants to provide. Nothing could be further from the truth. I 
seldom cite polls in things that I say because I don't want to be poll 
driven. I do not want to follow polls around. I want to try to find out 
what is the right thing to do. Living by polls is like driving down the 
road looking in the rear view mirror to find out what people thought a 
little while ago. We need to be driving down the road finding out where 
we need to be and where we want to go.
  But there are those who say that, well, we can't say to the American 
people they should not embrace the President's proposal because the 
American people want the President's proposal. Here is what the Wall 
Street Journal said about that. This was quite some time ago:

       The Wall Street Journal/NBC national poll found that 81 
     percent of adults favor President Clinton's initiative, with 
     almost half the public strongly in favor and only 16 percent 
     opposed.
       But when asked whether the federal government should 
     establish a national test--with questions spelling out the 
     pro and con arguments of a standard national accountability 
     vs. ceding too much power to the federal government--the 
     public splits 49 percent to 47 percent, barely in favor.

  This is fewer than half the people. With just one moment of 
explanation, all of a sudden the so-called 81 percent endorsement 
crumbles. When the real facts of the proposed federalized national test 
mandated by a group of folks acting as a national school board, in 
effect, in Washington, DC, reach the American people, they are going to 
know that is not the recipe for greatness. That is a recipe for 
disaster.

  I have to say this is a little bit like the health care program that 
got so much support early on, but the more people knew, the less they 
liked it. One academic writer whom I will have an opportunity to quote 
when I speak again at another time says that the worst thing that could 
happen for the President would be for this plan for testing to be 
implemented because people would find out the disaster that it would 
really cause in the event it were implemented.
  Our primary objective must be preparing the next generation 
educationally for the future, and we cannot pull

[[Page S10937]]

the rug from beneath the components that make education a success--
parental involvement, a strong culture supporting education at home, 
local control, the ability to change things that are failing, and the 
ability to adjust at the local level. A national bureaucracy cannot get 
that done. It is something that we must not embrace. National 
federalized testing is a concept that must be rejected if we are to 
save the opportunity for the future for our children.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from 
Michigan.
  Mr. ABRAHAM. I thank the Chair. I appreciate being recognized.

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