WASHINGTON – The federal government should test children yearly in math, science, reading or writing – and pay for much of it – a panel of lawmakers, educators and businessmen said Thursday.

Two days after a study showed that U.S. students were just average compared with the rest of the world, the group urged the next administration to do what it takes to meet national education goals set 10 years ago.

“The way we are doing it now is not meeting our needs,” said former Maine Gov. John R. McKernan, a one-time chair of the National Education Goals panel, which is charged with guiding states on how to boost their education systems.

The panel wants to create a schedule by which schools would administer standardized tests in at least one of the four core subjects once a year.

The only way states currently know how they match up against other states is through a voluntary national program that tests a sample of children roughly every two years in a given subject.

But some results are based on data that’s three years old when released.

The information is too outdated to help schools decide what to do, said McKernan, who led a task force creating several recommendations to be formalized and presented in February to the new U.S. president.

“I don’t see how we can continue by putting out reports that aren’t current,” said Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, the panel’s chairman.

Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, locked in a battle for the presidency, both promised to require greater testing as a way to hold schools accountable for student performance.

But President Clinton, a goals panel pioneer with former President George Bush, was rebuffed by Congress two years ago when he proposed national testing standards.

Opponents thought states should control what children are taught, and said that national testing added too much to the slew of state, school district and classroom exams.

Panel members suggest governors might warm to the idea with more money from Washington, more ways to relate national tests to state-given ones and more proof that schools can develop better teaching methods based on the research.

“It’s not a question of too much testing but of too little help for schools,” said Michael Cohen, Education Secretary Richard Riley’s K-12 deputy.

The Education Department’s research arm spends about $68 million a year trying to report adequately on the progress of 53 million K-12 schoolchildren.

“We have had a decade of data insufficiency,” McKernan said. “We need to decide whether we are serious about our education goals and spending the money necessary to gather the data to determine whether we’re meeting the goals.”

Last year, a decade after Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, and then-President Bush inaugurated the group, it concluded that the country had not sufficiently met eight goals that included better reading and math performance and higher graduation rates.

Some feared the backlash could be aimed at the panel, which does not set policy and mainly collects data. At issue for some critics is the renewal of the federal funds the group gets to study the goals.

House Republicans tried to completely cut the annual $2.3 million; a compromise with the Senate – if the budget is ever approved in lame-duck session negotiations – would give the panel $1.5 million.