CATO's Neal McLuskey and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham are strange bedfellows, but they both have the same burning question on their minds: Why would national standards and tests be any better than state standards and tests? McLuskey writes:
Why would the teachers unions, public-school administrators associations, and education bureaucrats--with their huge presences in and around DC, their outsized political power compared to parents, and their overwhelming interest in low standards and high funding--have any less sway over the feds than they have over other levels of government?
I understand, as a blogger, that I should provide a glib, snarky response. But in all fairness, it's a good question and a fair concern. In fact, it's such a good question that we dedicated an entire Fordham report--two years ago--to answering it. Andy should know; he contributed to it. (OK, that was a bit snarky.)
In To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America's Schools, we surveyed twelve smart people and asked them to answer this question and others that pertain to the nuts and bolts of making national testing a reality. In the end, four models emerged, as shown in the table below. Two of the models seemed most likely to "result in rigorous standards": having the federal government create a national test, probably by starting with the NAEP, and providing incentives to states to get on board; and an inter-state, bottom-up effort to "hold hands" and develop common standards and tests. It's this latter strategy that has legs, with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve working to make it happen. There's no guarantee that it will result in a good end-product, but with the right people leading the process it could happen.
What's most promising about an inter-state approach is that it might allow states, as a whole, to set higher standards than they would set by themselves. That's because the "common" effort will provide political cover for governors and state chiefs who want higher standards but can't easily sell it to their local constituents (i.e., the unions, etc., that McCluskey worries about). Our Proficiency Illlusion report showed one case where this happened in practice: New Hampshire raised its standards when it entered a testing consortium with Rhode Island and Vermont, an indication that a larger state consortium could yield similar results.
And as said Proficiency Illusion report showed, it's hard to imagine that national standards and tests could be any less rigorous than the state standards and tests we have today.
Andy and Neal: satisfied?
