Bush's big test: the president's education bill is a disaster in the making. Here's how he can fix it.

• Author: Toch, Thomas
• Position: Standardized tests

SOMETIME VERY SOON, POSSIBLY BY THE time you read this, Congress is likely to pass the president's education plan--a sweeping blueprint to reform the nation's public schools. But the legislation is a disaster in the making. The White House knows this. In fact, the White House and Capitol Hill insiders who drafted the legislation have known it for months--ever since the day last April, when Senate staffer Mark Powden showed them why.

Powden, then Sen. Jim Jeffords's staff director on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was part of a bipartisan group of congressional staffers readying the Bush plan for a vote by the full Senate. The House and Senate committees had already signed off on the plan and its core proposal to test every third- through eighth-grader in the public schools and then sanction their schools (and school systems and states) if their test scores failed to improve. It was a plan on which George W. Bush had run for president--his single best claim to being a "compassionate conservative? The public was demanding school reform, and it was badly needed.

But Powden, an 18-year Hill veteran, doubted the plan's ability to gauge schools' performance correctly--the linchpin of the Bush plan. So, as an experiment, he applied the Bush model retroactively to test scores in Connecticut, North Carolina, and Texas, three states that had improved their scores significantly in recent years. He discovered that the vast majority of the states' schools--schools with established track records in raising student achievement--would be labeled failures under the Bush system. When Powden presented his findings to White House officials and his fellow Senate staffers at a late-night meeting at the Dirksen Senate Office Building "there was stunned silence," recalls a participant. Powden, they realized, had just turned the cornerstone of their school reform package into dust.

White House education advisor Sandy Kress, the testing plan's author, scrambled to draft a new plan that the Senate passed in June. But independent testing experts who had read the plan's fine print pointed out that the new plan was no less flawed than the original. Kress himself would later call the new plan "Rube Goldbergesque."

The White House and the staff of a joint House and Senate committee struggled throughout the summer to make the testing plan work. Bush political advisor Karl Rove was pressing for a bipartisan Rose Garden signing ceremony in September. But by the time Congress returned to work after Labor Day, the bill's authors still hadn't fixed the plan. Instead, new flaws had emerged.

Then came the events of September 11. Suddenly, nearly the entire domestic agendas of both parties--from Social Security reform to prescription drug coverage--were shelved. A nation at war, which could no longer afford partisan squabbling, submitted instead to a hasty bipartisanship. But, in late September, with both parties convinced that holding educators more accountable for their students' performance would strengthen public education, the president ordered a full-court press to get the bill passed by year's end.

So, rather than openly debate the bill's many defects, Congress is now under intense pressure to pass something--anything--fast. And the likely result will be legislation that hurts the nation's students more than it helps them, promotes lower rather than higher standards; misleads the public about school performance; pushes top teachers out of schools where they are most needed; and drives down the level of instruction in many classrooms.

There is a way out of this mess, however. The White House and Congress need to take a deep breath, grab a fresh sheet of paper, and sketch out a new accountability plan built around the one element many insiders privately admit is missing: a national test of reading and math. Such a test would have been politically impossible to pass just weeks ago. But the political winds have shifted so dramatically that if the president were to seize the moment, he could very likely make it happen.

If he doesn't, and Congress passes a big, badly designed federal testing and sanctions system, it could cripple the entire standards movement in public education--a movement that has been building momentum and garnering results at state and local levels since 1989. That year, Charlottesville, Virginia, hosted a summit between President George H. W. Bush and the nation's governors, led by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Bush and the governors bucked the nation's long-standing trend of local control in public schooling and established as a national "goal" that students in grades four, eight, and 12 demonstrate "competency" in challenging subjects such as English and math. Since then, ratcheting up standards has become a cornerstone...