DEBATING STANDARDS

By Paul Gray

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY AKNOWLedged that politicians can with impunity call for better performances from U.S. schoolchildren. Those who are being hectored to pull up their socks and hit those books are too young to vote. So the 41 Governors who assembled last week in picturesque, exurban Palisades, New York, for the two-day National Education Summit had no reason to fear a backlash from their constituents--i.e., registered parents back home.

But that didn't mean that the public sessions and backstage consultations were entirely serene and bromidic. All the Governors, plus the 49 invited executives from some of the largest U.S. companies (IBM, AT&T, Eastman Kodak), agreed that public education is broken and woefully in need of fixing. "We have students," said Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, co-chair of the conference, "graduating from high school with diplomas that they can't even read, who can't write a coherent sentence or do basic math." The other co-chair, IBM chief executive Louis V. Gerstner Jr., whose critical remarks on education to a Governors' Conference last July spurred this meeting, told one session, "It is not in the interest of business leaders to turn public schools into vocational schools. We can teach [students] how to be marketing people. We can teach them how to manage balance sheets. What is killing us is having to teach them to read and to compute and to communicate and to think."

So much for the broken part. The fixing proved contentious. Most of the Governors were at pains to distinguish this summit from the gathering of state leaders assembled by President George Bush in 1989. That conclave, in which Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton played an influential role, wound up endorsing the formulation of federally developed national standards by which student competence would be judged. This decision not only ran counter to the nation's long tradition of local control (thanks to local funding) of public schools; it also proved embarrassingly hard to implement. A blue-ribbon panel dithered over a national history standard and eventually brought forth a politically correct screed that was denounced by professional historians and rejected last year by a Senate vote of 99 to 1. A similar report on national English standards struck many people as so poorly written as to be useless.

President Clinton, who spoke at the summit on its final day, acknowledged that attempts to establish national standards have been "less than successful." But if setting one goal seems impossible, what is to be done?

After much debate, the summit participants addressed this question with three resolutions. The Governors agreed to adopt their own "internationally competitive academic standards" within two years. The business leaders pledged that in one year they will begin asking for academic transcripts from job applicants and consider a state's educational standards when deciding where to open new plants. And all resolved to establish within 90 days an independent, nongovernmental body that will act as an "information clearinghouse," measuring, comparing and reporting on each state's annual progress.

It doesn't take someone with an indecipherable high school diploma to sense the presence of more than a little political walking on eggshells here. The "clearinghouse," measuring how Mississippi stacks up against Montana and Virginia against Vermont, seemed to some a way of establishing national standards without calling them national standards. It was resistance from various political-interest groups in fear of the dreaded hand of Washington that frustrated the Bush-era effort. The call for state standards is designed to let the measures be created, and argued about, at the local level. Virginia Governor George Allen, for example, tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the clearinghouse from the final resolutions.

For all their good intentions, the Palisades summiteers, some critics concluded, were guilty of believing that illness can be ordered out of existence. Says Michael Resnick, senior associate executive director of the National School Boards Association: "What about children coming to schools who aren't healthy, who are hungry, from crime-ridden neighborhoods and who can't concentrate on learning because of all these other problems? How will standards fix those problems?"

And at least one of the departing Governors, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge, agreed: "We're saying to America that standards and technology are very important. On that we all agree. But it would be a mistake if we left this meeting giving the impression that we think standards and technology will fix all the problems we have in education today." Not all, but perhaps some.

--Reported by Jenifer Mattos/Palisades

With reporting by JENIFER MATTOS/PALISADES