Enough testing

President Clinton’s attempt to resurrect his moribund national education testing plan by taking federal bureaucrats out of the picture is an improvement. Dropping the idea altogether would be even better.

In his “back to school” radio address Saturday, the president promised to rewrite his long-cherished plan in a way to ease fears of a federal takeover of the nation’s schools — the test for reading and math proficiency now will be developed by an independent bipartisan board, rather than the much-criticized U.S. Department of Education.

Considering that the entire Education Department is at the top of many a list for bureaucratic extinction, that’s a wise and necessary move. Considering that the independent bipartisan board is likely to be indistinguishable from the Department of Education, it seems like a minor bit of fiddling that doesn’t address the bigger questions.

Are not the nation’s schoolchildren tested enough already? Do we not already know that our math and science performance, while improving slightly, still trails other developed nations and that our reading and writing skills are abominable? Will one more test, demographically and sociologically watered down to boost the national self esteem, do any good? Could not the money to be spent on this — $16 million to develop the test and $100 million each year thereafter to administer it — be put to a better use, such as actually helping kids learn?

And, if the test does reveal some identifiable, specific problems to fix, where’s the money with which to do the fixing? Does the phrase “unfunded mandate” ring a bell?

The irony in the president’s call for national performance testing is that it is based upon what looks like some pretty thorough testing already done, the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested about 30,000 pupils, nine to 17 years of age, since 1978. Nearly 20 years of random sampling shows a modest improvement in math and science, but a decline in reading and writing skills.

The report not only identifies the problem in an entirely adequate way, but also pinpoints the cause: 39 percent of the 17-year-olds tested say they watch as much as five hours of television a day, up from 26 percent in 1978. The number who read for fun daily has dropped in proportion. Nearly one-fifth say they never, ever, read for fun.

Spending $100 million a year for more testing won’t change a national bad habit. As Monty Neill, head of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, puts it, “You don’t fatten cattle by weighing them more often.”

The national testing was a cornerstone of the presiden’t very first state of the union address back in 1993. It’s gone nowhere: only six states and 15 major school districts have shown any interest. Dressing it up in new school clothes doesn’t make it any less unnecessary or redundant.

The nation’s pupils have been tested quite enough, the deficiencies are obvious and $100 million could go a long way toward fixing them. Just paying kids not to watch so much TV would do more good than another test.