In this space two weeks ago (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=66#983), I reported that Congressman Michael Castle's (R-Delaware) bill to remake the federal education research enterprise had much merit but also posed some problems, especially regarding the future of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and its governing board (NAGB).
In two rounds of mark-ups, it's nice to be able to note, the House Education Committee resolved most of those problems (and made other worthy improvements in the bill), thanks mainly to the direct engagement and savvy of Representatives Castle and Dale Kildee (D-Michigan) and their sleepless staffers. Castle and Kildee understand the importance of the "nation's report card" and the care that must go into any alteration of its constitutional arrangements. So does Representative Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia), who offered the key amendments to the Committee. Hurrah for them!
Their efforts reflect a bipartisan consensus that was signaled at a spring 2000 Congressional hearing where one of the (few) things Republicans and Democrats agreed upon was that the National Assessment must be kept as independent as Congress can manage. That was true then. It's even truer today, considering the many new mandates that the No Child Left Behind act laid upon NAEP.
But the H.R. 3801 repair squad has been laboring under two constraints: some House colleagues who are mistrustful of NAEP ("the camel's nose of national testing") and some Education Department officials who don't want NAGB truly to be in charge of NAEP because that would mean they're not.
In that unhappy environment, the best that Messrs. Castle and Kildee felt they could do was to strive to preserve the "status quo ante," which means retaining a split jurisdiction wherein the "independent" governing board makes some NAEP decisions and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)-currently part of OERI-makes other decisions. This has not worked any too smoothly over the years and ought to be fixed. But politics seem to preclude a proper reconstruction. Hence the quest to maintain the status quo, even as H.R. 3801 puts OERI through a wholesale reorganization into the new Academy of Education Sciences.
The problem with trying to hang onto the status quo is that the Academy represents a profound alteration of the status quo for NCES, which becomes far less independent than it is today and subject to the dictates of both the highly-independent Academy director and a new Education Sciences Board with wide-ranging powers of its own. How to preserve the current "balance of power" between NCES and NAGB as powerful new players enter the NCES orbit? It's impossible. It's chimerical. A million unknowns arise.
Thus the Education Committee faced a true puzzle. In marking-up H.R. 3801, it assembled many of the pieces, exempting NAEP from certain parts of the new Academy and NAGB from other parts. The present bill might even yield a workable arrangement IF NAGB and the Academy director (and Education Sciences Board) forever see eye to eye. But when they disagree, as must eventually happen, even this much-improved bill is a formula for deadlock and confusion. That's not a sound basis for a constitutional arrangement. It's way too dependent on personalities and na??ve about what can go wrong.
Example: Under current law, NAGB develops policy for the preparation and content of NAEP reports and formulates plans for their release. Under H.R. 3801 (as amended), however, the Academy director is charged with devising peer-review procedures for all Academy reports, presumably including NAEP's. What happens when there's a clash between NAGB's view of how to present NAEP reading results, say, and that of unknown "peer reviewers" selected by someone else according to who knows what criteria? Prediction: NAEP reports will become even slower and more complex than they are today. Picture the 2004 fourth-grade reading results finally lumbering into public view in 2007 when that cohort of students is completing seventh grade. And being unintelligible to the general reader after having been mauled by 57 "experts."
Example: Under current law, NAGB designs the NAEP testing and sampling methodologies and develops processes for their ongoing review and revision-sort of a continuous-improvement model. Under H.R. 3801, however, the Academy director is supposed to ensure that everything done by the Academy is "consistent with standards" as defined by him and his new board. What if NAGB's decisions about testing methods and the Director's notion of testing standards are not compatible? Consider, for instance, the interesting suggestion by Richard Rothstein in yesterday's New York Times that NAEP's long-term trend test should be merged with its more contemporary test into a single measure akin to the Consumer Price Index. That would be a very big change. It might or might not be a good one. But whose decision is it? Under H.R.3801, nobody has clear authority over key policies. It's hard to believe the Congress wants it that way.
I could go on. Many uncertainties present themselves, even after Messrs. Castle, Kildee and Isakson strove to preserve the status quo. The fact is that they've embarked on an impossible task with unknowable, hence problematic consequences. It's akin to brokering a permanent Middle East settlement between two countries, one of which remains unchanged while the other acquires a new government whose leaders are unknown.
Maybe the House floor will bring more amendments. Perhaps a third cheer will then be warranted for this basically sound bill. Otherwise, those who want to assure the integrity of NAEP must look to the Senate to set this important matter right. The Senate is where NAEP's present governance structure was crafted in 1988. Perhaps that chamber will prove better able to preserve it-or even improve it.
"National Test Is Out of Tune With Times," by Richard Rothstein, The New York Times, March 27, 2002
