High standards, low expectations

DALLAS – Voters could have assumed that President Bush wouldn't ace all his courses in his first semester. Bush never said that foreign policy was his strong suit or that he was a whiz at the "fuzzy math'' necessary to calculate budget surpluses. But he was passionate about one subject – education – and he insisted that his six years as governor of Texas had given him the expertise to make America's mediocre public schools less so.

Bush promised to raise standards, increase accountability and ensure that there be – as suggested by the title of the education plan that he sent to Congress – "No Child Left Behind.'' When one considers that catch phrase along with what Bush correctly diagnoses as the public school system's "bigotry of low expectations,'' it becomes clear just which group of children Bush believes is most often left behind. The same public education system that works fine for the children of the well-to-do often fails those who are poor, especially those who happen to also be African American or Latino. Bush – who is locked in a perpetual lobbying effort to convince minority voters that he is sensitive to their concerns – vowed to do something about it.

Now, as a joint committee prepares to work out differences in separate education bills approved by the House and Senate, the Bush administration seems to be signaling its willingness to break that promise and once again sacrifice its principles for an easy political victory. The cowardice exhibited by this go-along-to-get-along bunch in recoiling earlier from its own proposal to give vouchers to students in failing schools pales in comparison to this wholesale retreat from a more important battlefield – the demand for increased accountability from schools and those who work in them.

In lowering its own expectations, the administration left behind Republican allies in the House. In championing the president's demand for "adequate yearly progress'' for all students regardless of race or economic status, these House Republicans did their part by dishing out the tough medicine that schools be required to teach students well enough to meet requirements in reading and writing in 12 years. And, just to keep everybody honest, test results would be "disaggregated" (broken down) by race.

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Convinced, however, that its own goals are unrealistic and unattainable, the administration continues to telegraph that it is prepared to swallow the weaker tonic prescribed by defenders of the educational status quo in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

While the House leaders speak of demands and requirements, their more timid colleagues in the Senate prefer to talk in terms of requests and goals. While the House advances the radical notion that states use tests to actually measure student proficiency by grade level, the Senate is content to allow tests that merely compare student performance.

And while the House tries to shine the light on just how poorly many schools educate minority kids, the Senate perpetuates the darkness by allowing states to report student achievement as an average of scores among all groups. That way, the performance of minority students can be buried among the higher scores of others.

This game of bureaucratic hide-and-go-seek keeps parents in the dark, keeps teachers out of trouble and, most importantly for Senate Democrats, keeps contributions from appreciative teachers unions flowing into Democratic Party coffers.

Those Democrats found unlikely allies in Republican governors and state school superintendents of both parties, many of whom are up for re-election next year. The governors fear that some of the public criticism for shoddy student performance might be aimed at them. The superintendents are not eager to give the administration credit for testing reforms already under way at the state level.

White House educational adviser Sandy Kress, in trying to explain how the Bush administration came to be so terrified of its own reform agenda, resorted to the modern mantra that one can have progress without pain.

"The question is where the bar should be set,'' Kress told the New York Times. "Do you set it at a level where the most troubled schools would be slated for serious corrective action, or have a standard that most schools across the country would fail?''

In case you were wondering, that's how the Bush White House differs from your average kindergarten classroom. In the latter, the proper response to rampant instances of failure is not to simply lower the bar but to attempt to do better. In government, as in education, demanding little yields little. Either way, the lesson is the same – that high standards cannot survive low expectations.

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