Bush Defends His Call for Standardized School Tests

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — President Bush returned Monday to one of his favorite, and most politically potent, topics: the improvements that he said can come to a public school when authorities are held accountable for academic performance.

Greater accountability through new annual reading and math tests in the third through eighth grades is a key element of the education reform law Bush steered through Congress.

Visiting an extended-year elementary school near Detroit at which reading and math test scores have improved significantly during the last decade, Bush sought to respond to critics of such standardized exams. “We must be wise enough to measure.... We must incorporate accountability and then be quick enough to change when we find failure. And mark my words what’s going to happen: We’re going to start seeing great progress,” he told several hundred people in the gymnasium at Vandenberg Elementary School.

The speech, at a school where about 60% of the student population of 410 is Arabic-speaking, was one of the rare occasions in which Bush did not devote a significant portion of his remarks to the war on terrorism or the Middle East.

Although much of his week will be spent on the Middle East--he meets at the White House today with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Wednesday with Jordan King Abdullah II--he also plans to focus on domestic issues in trips to Wisconsin, Ohio and Illinois.

Michigan and these other Midwest states often are swing states in presidential elections. And as part of building support for his reelection, as well as helping Republican prospects in this year’s midterm elections, Bush periodically touts his commitment to and record on education. His attention to the issue provides him the chance to show his interests go beyond distant crises to include subjects closer to home.

“I will spend as much time as necessary to herald success in our public schools,” he said Monday. “We’ve got to get public schools right.”

Bush’s push for education reform was a central theme of his 2000 presidential campaign, and the bill he signed into law in January included several of his proposals.

The measure, which gained bipartisan backing, gives state and local school districts more freedom in how they spend federal dollars. But in return they must toughen teacher standards, offer new options to parents whose children attend poorly performing schools and impose the annual reading and math tests, beginning in the 2005-06 school year.

Bush said that Vandenberg Elementary demonstrates the usefulness of testing. “This school is a living example of great progress. Kind of at the bottom of the measurement standards, if I’m not mistaken, five years ago, and now you’re soaring off the chart.”

Even as reliance on standardized testing appears to be spreading, some critics complain that many exams are insufficient measures of academic achievement. The critics also complain that the emphasis placed on the tests forces teachers to spend too much time preparing students, at the cost of exploring other subjects and curricula.

Responding to the critics, Bush said, “If you don’t want to measure, it kind of makes me worry that maybe ... you’re not confident about either your teacher quality or your curriculum.”

The testing issue is a particularly hot topic in April and May, when students in many school districts are taking standardized exams.

Bush noted that, in the current fiscal year, federal education spending includes a 25% increase in aid for secondary and elementary schools and a 35% increase for teacher recruitment. Such spending justifies the accountability demands, he said.

“If you spend something, you ought to get results for it,” he said.

Several Democrats who supported the education reform bill have accused Bush of short-changing schools in his proposed budget for the 2003 fiscal year. And they were quick to take exception to his comments Monday.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate education committee, said Bush has “put forward the worst education budget in a decade.”

Kennedy said the 2.8% increase Bush proposed for education was the smallest in seven years. He said overall increases in federal education spending had averaged 13% annually the last seven years.