When President Clinton announces that federal education dollars would, under a new proposal, flow to only those states that meet federal standards, local education leaders could be excused for thinking, “What federal standards?” The president last night presented a message that has tested positively with any number of focus groups, but he forgot or ignored that focus groups are not substitutes for substantial debate.

Almost no one is against setting standards for students, but an equally few people agree on what those standards should be, at least initially, and whether the standards should be set on the local, state or federal levels. In Maine, the call for standards produced a three-year battle that ended with the Learning Results. Many other states, having gone through their own debates, have similar plans, but there has been no national discourse on the need for a single sets of standards.

The president’s plan is to withhold the $20 billion in existing federal funds from schools that fail to meet a federal standard. Chances are excellent that he doesn’t know what the Learning Results has to say about algebra or literature or foreign language and doesn’t much care. Maine has something it can hold up and claim meets the federal standard and that probably would be good enough to keep the money coming. What is irritating, however, is that President Clinton assumes the question of national standards has been answered before it properly has been raised.

There are times when a federal presence in school is needed: when widespread disparities of opportunity exist based on race or sex, for instance. Then a bold assertion from the federal government assuring all of its citizens a chance to learn is a necessary intrusion in what otherwise is a local process. Other countries with test scores better than those in the United States impose national standards, and perhaps someone could make a case for national standards here. Perhaps the president could be the one to do it.

Or perhaps not. During his 1998 State of the Union, the president emphasized that schools could meet standards through a voluntary national test of fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. Not much ground swollen over that idea, so this time the president tied future funding to it, making it anything but voluntary.

This may sound radical in the field of education, but the threat of a penalty for not meeting national standards probably should come after the president tells the public why it should want the standards in the first place.