NATIONAL SCHOOL STANDARDS? NO THANKS!

Is there any field of endeavor in which fads come and go with more dependable regularity than in the business of schooling our children? Clothing and the fashion industry, you might answer. Perhaps, but we would put Big Education up against the rag trade any day.

Today's rage among the educrats is the proposal for so-called national testing standards. Big Education has signed on President Clinton, who is using the White House megaphone to promote the idea. Some polls have shown wide public support for the notion, and such surveys are always a good forecaster of where this president will come down on any issue. Last week, the president even went so far to stress that he would veto any education measure Congress might send him that didn't include the millions he wants to cook up these tests.

How, one wonders, did Americans ever receive a sound education in the 221 years of nationhood before somebody thought up the idea of national standard testing? The answer is that generations of Americans did just fine, not only without such standardized tests, but without the enormous federal intrusion that has advanced on every local school district these last 30 years. Nationally standardized tests, at least any that are likely to be produced by the Clinton administration, will doubtless be another grim chapter in the sad story of federal intervention in what is properly a state and local responsibility.

"But these national tests are needed to prepare our workforce for the challenges of the global economy in the 21st century," we are told by proponents. Rubbish. What parents desperately want and employers are demanding is sound schooling in the basics. What consumers of education emphatically don't want is more mushy faddishness of the kind that emerges from the educrats who so dominate today's education establishment.

Good teachers know how and what to teach. Local school boards and superintendents know how to run their schools. They should be allowed to do so without this additional attempt at federal intervention. To this point only six states have signed onto the idea of national testing. Congress should just say no and, while they're at it, get back to the idea of abolishing the unnecessary federal Department of Education.