ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 28, 1996 TAG: 9603280065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PALISADES, N.Y.
SOURCE: The Washington Post
The nation's governors pledged Wednesday to revive the campaign for higher academic standards by setting more rigorous goals for their own students in the next two years.
The governors said that attempts to create new, voluntary national guidelines for schools, launched at their last national summit on education seven years ago, have been greeted with great suspicion locally. The only politically viable way to bring higher academic standards to the nation's classrooms, they said, is to keep the federal government's role absolutely minimal.
President Clinton conceded as much when he addressed the governors Wednesday, but he urged them nevertheless to set standards that are consistent from state to state. ``While I believe they should be set by the states and the testing mechanisms should be approved by the states, we shouldn't kid ourselves,'' the president said. ``Being promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in Pasadena, California, that it does in Palisades, New York. In a global society, it ought to mean more or less the same thing.''
The president also challenged the governors to require students to pass tough new exams - especially in subjects like reading - before allowing them to move on from elementary, middle and high school.
The governors went to great lengths during the summit to minimize the role of Clinton, Education Secretary Richard Riley and the rest of federal government in helping them set new standards for students. Unlike the last summit, they also avoided any mention of national educational goals or standards.
Yet the governors are vowing to create a nationwide clearinghouse for states to share information on how to set and assess standards and to try to create more consistency in what schools expect of students.
In many states, setting high academic standards - and holding schools accountable to them - is proving to be a difficult, and often controversial, task.
Even the general statement that the governors drafted for having better standards ignited political bickering here. Some conservative governors, including Virginia's George Allen, vowed not to back it until all references to ``national'' academic goals or standards were edited out. That angered other governors - Colorado's Roy Romer, a Democrat, called Allen ``paranoid'' - but in the end they agreed unanimously to support the summit's goals.
Many states are already trying to create higher academic expectations for students, but business leaders say that too often what they are producing is either too vague or lacks real consequence. In recent years, panels of education experts for the first time have created voluntary national guidelines for core academic subjects, as is common practice in most other nations. But state and local leaders have dismissed or denounced some of those projects.
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