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widely accepted by the nation's math teachers, they were enormously in–
fluential. More than forty states adopted them as the basis for teacher
training; they were endorsed even by schools of education, which are
usually averse to standards. Published in 1989, the NCTM standards af–
fected not only teacher preparation but textbooks, tests , and classroom
instruction. It seemed clear that education reform could begin only with
an agreement about what children should learn, and what they learned
should be at least as demanding as what their peers were learning in
other industrialized countries.
The Clinton administration's education reform legislation embraced
the importance of standards. Clinton and Riley had been active in the
Southern Regional Education Board, and Clinton had played a leading
role in the framing of the national education goals. We might now be
well on our way to establishing voluntary national standards for educa–
tion, an historic first, but for two elements that Congress - namely, the
House Committee on Education and Labor - imposed on the Clinton
bill. First, there would be no national testing, and any state test that
won the approval of the federal government could have no consequences
attached to it for at least five years . That is , tests could not be used to
determine whether students would be promoted or graduated. The legis–
lation creates a body that will function like a national school board,
called the National Education Standards and Improvement Council (the
year before, in the Bush legislation, the same body was called the
National Education Standards and Assessment Council, but in 1993
Congress deleted the word "assessment" to express its hostility to test–
ing). All of the twenty members of this new body will be appointed by
the President, and all are likely to be professional educators. Any state
that submits its testing system
to
this agency for certification can no
longer use that test for purposes of graduation, promotion , or program
placement. In other words, once certified, the test is rendered useless.
Second, Congress insisted that "opportunity-to-learn" standards must
be as important as content standards. "Opportunity-to-learn" standards
refer to resources. The bill will create a new federal commission to de–
fine what these standards are, and they may likely include the preparation
of the teachers (teacher educators will no doubt insist that every teacher
have the requisite pedagogical courses); class size; policy for grouping by
ability; equality of resources with other districts in the state; and almost
anything that the members of the commission decide is necessary to cre–
ate the right "opportunity to learn." If the commission is captured by
representatives of education interest groups, a common phenomenon in
Washington , it will present every school with a very expensive list of
"must-haves." The commission could become a source of expensive un–
funded mandates, as well as a means to impose national policies on issues
