Maine has an abundance of experience with the centerpiece of the federal education reform bill passed last week in the House and soon to be passed in the Senate. State-wide testing to determine what students are learning has become an essential measure of student progress here and an integral part of Learning Results.

Though Maine has been testing its students through the Maine Education Assessment for nearly 20 years and scores highly on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal legislation could leave the state in a difficult position. Congress will require testing each year in grades three through eight. Because the MEAs (administered in fourth, eighth and 11th grades) take three weeks out of a school year, Maine cannot afford to lose the instruction time by administering them annually. And, given the MEA’s role in the Learning Results, the state should not drop them in favor of a standardized national test should one be offered.

Even if Maine did not have its MEAs, a single national test is a poor idea for a couple of other reasons. Local control is jealously guarded in education, sometimes because of mere parochialism but more often because the school boards, parents, administrators, teachers and students have a firmer sense of what a district needs than a centralized authority could. Keeping the control at the state level for testing is a reasonable compromise between this advantage and the need for some uniformity.

And in cases such as Maine’s, success in climbing in the national rankings for academic achievement for most school districts would be slowed if it merely had to pass, say, in the top third of national math and reading tests. Schools regularly provide different levels of rigor in their courses for students. There’s no reason not to allow for similar differences among school districts, as long as the federal Department of Education recognizes this difference.

That leaves what the King administration hopes is a rather loose interpretation of “annual testing.” Could, for instance, Maine use the MEAs as it has been and perform a less elaborate review of student performance during the off years? The state Department of Education has been told by the Bush administration this is a possibility but there is nothing in either the Senate or House bill that allows this.

The best reason to believe there will be some flexibility in the federal approach is that the education bill represents a whopping federal mandate that would cost $24 billion next year alone. In the likely event the administration fails to fund the entire proposal, it may have little choice but to let successful states continue as they have been and instead focus on states needing more help.

Standardized testing is a valuable tool for parents and policy-makers to see how well students individually and schools generally are making progress in improving academics. If it seems like a revelation that Maine had 15 years ago, that’s because it is, and Maine shouldn’t be held back because the federal government was slow to catch on.