But the victory, spurred by conservative education groups, could come back to haunt Republicans if they don't do a better of explaining why a national test is a bad idea. Simply repeating that American education policy is set at the local level won't be enough to satisfy most parents in this increasingly mobile society. Families often change school districts over the course of their children's school careers. In fact, the problem with a national test is not, necessarily, that it would be uniformly administered across the country or that schools would therefore begin to homogenize their curricula to conform to the test. The real problem is that the education bureaucrats who would devise the test are the same ones who have dumbed-down the curriculum for the past several decades and would lower standards, not raise them, as the president promised.
Parents have plenty of experience with education reforms that make matters worse for their children.
And we've watched figures like Albert Einstein and the Wright brothers disappear from our children's American history textbooks to make room for obscure feminists and ancient Mayan rulers. Parents are not so much wary of testing or standards as they are concerned about exactly what students will be expected to know and why. Too often, parents who expect schools to teach their children to write a grammatically correct sentence with no spelling errors, find their home state on a map and calculate the change they're owed when they make a purchase find that some schools seem more interested in indoctrinating kids to recycle newspapers and cans. The student should be able to spell and define words such as assignment, neighbor and receive. The average eighth-grader should be able to do long division, figure percentages, measure the area of room, balance a checkbook, calculate with decimals and solve a simple equation.