Basic Mastery of 5 Subjects Urged for U.S. Classrooms

The federal government should create an autonomous organization to draw up and institute national curriculum standards to spell out what American schoolchildren should know in five basic subjects, an advisory panel recommended Friday.

The National Council on Education Standards and Testing said in a long-awaited report that to guarantee the new permanent body has “substantial latitude,” it should be “as independent of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies as permissible under federal law.”

The new organization, known as the National Education Standards and Assessments Council (NESAC), would consist of 21 people, a third of them public officials, a third educators and a third members of the general public. They would serve three-year terms and be appointed by the National Education Goals Panel that was established within the Department of Education after President Bush’s 1989 “Education Summit” with the nation’s governors. The goal would be to have the new standards and tests in place by 1994. No costs of such a program were estimated in the report.

The proposal for an independent organization was the most significant new feature in the council’s report, which has been the subject of wide discussion in recent months. The report calls for national standards for student learning as well as followup tests to determine what children have mastered in the subjects of history, math, geography, English and science.

The recommendations marked an important shift toward centralizing U.S. education and away from the local or state control of policy and curriculum that has always been the hallmark of American schools. States would be asked voluntarily to adopt the new standards.

A plan of national standards is already being developed by some professional groups, the council said, and their recommendations will be studied closely. Such a plan is modeled after a widely hailed program to overhaul the teaching of history that was adopted four years ago by California education officials.

The congressionally-appointed council that produced the report was co-chaired by Republican Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. of South Carolina and Democratic Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado. Their report reflected rare consensus among Administration officials, education-minded governors, congressional leaders and educators, all of whom were represented on the panel.

“We presently evaluate student and system performance largely through measures that tell us how many students are above or below average, or that compare relative performances among schools, districts or states,” Campbell and Romer said in a letter explaining the report.

But they declared that “most measurements cannot tell us whether students are actually acquiring the skills and knowledge they will need to prosper in the future. They cannot tell us how good is ‘good enough.’ ”

The council’s report said national standards should outline “the basic understandings that all students need to acquire, but not everything a student should learn.” To be fully implemented, it said, “standards and assessments must be accompanied by appropriate federal, state and local policies that seek to ensure high quality resources, including instructional materials and well-prepared teachers.”

Stressing the important role that teachers must play once such standards are developed, the report said teachers “will need a deeper knowledge of subject matter and a better understanding of pedagogy.” It called for “substantial cooperation from universities, especially colleges of arts and sciences, in teacher preparation.”

In accepting the council’s report, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander said today’s students must compete internationally tomorrow. “If the world has high standards, our standards need to be as high if not higher,” he said.