What Do These Two Men Have In Common?

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But Atkinson did not propose abolishing all standardized admission tests and allowing students to get in to the University of California on high school grades alone. He proposed, instead, replacing the SAT with standardized achievement tests that measure students' mastery of specific subjects they have learned in high school. This will preserve the medicinal power of the SAT — its ability to spot a potential future Nobel prizewinner languishing in an obscure high school, which was Conant's main interest — while substantially reducing its harmful side effects.

The vast majority of test takers don't wind up going to lite schools like Berkeley. Requiring achievement tests rather than aptitude tests is much better for the average high school student. Instantly it becomes clear what the tests measure: learning. There is a clear incentive to study the course material in school, rather than try to learn test-taking tricks. Parents and the general public have a way of measuring the quality of high school education, which ought to be a step on the road to making schools better. Scores will register in the mind as a record of accomplishment, not intelligence.

President Bush proposed a regime of achievement tests for the elementary and middle school grades all over the country, and president Atkinson proposed a regime of achievement tests for high schools in California. It's all the same idea. Half a century ago, Conant and Chauncey created, in the SAT, national education standards for the most gifted and best educated few. Now Bush and Atkinson are proposing to create national education standards for the many.

As we will soon see, national achievement tests are going to set off a series of fights different but no less intense than the ones the SAT has set off. Teachers and schools, which will be, in effect, graded and will have at least a good portion of what they teach dictated to them by outsiders, won't especially like achievement tests. People will complain that the tests have transformed American schools into drill factories. If the tests are pitched at a high level, they will be accused of punishing poor and minority students, and if they are pitched at a low level, they will be accused of dumbing down the schools.

The fights ought not be taken as proof that national standards are unworkable. National standards serve a much more ambitious cause than the sats, and also a nobler one — not identifying a few very smart students regardless of background, Cinderella style, but trying to ensure that all students reliably acquire basic educational skills and therefore a meaningful chance in life.