FOR RELEASE Contact: Melinda Kitchell Malico September 25, 1997 (202) 401-1576
The Council of Chief State School Officers and the panel it established have concluded work on recommendations for specifications for national tests in the basic skills of reading and math. I thank them for their hard work on this very important effort.
The Administration has proposed that the independent bipartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) be in charge of the tests and I am pleased that the Senate voted by a large bipartisan majority to adopt our proposal. I hope and expect that this provision will soon be enacted into law when Congress completes work on the appropriations bill and sends the President a bill he can sign. At that point, NAGB will assume full responsibility for overseeing the development of the voluntary national tests.
NAGB already oversees the widely used and respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The NAEP frameworks were developed through a broad national consensus process and 43 states participate in the NAEP tests. The voluntary national tests will be based on the NAEP content and performance standards and must be fully consistent with NAEP. The voluntary national tests can be thought of as individualized versions of NAEP that, unlike NAEP, will for the first time provide parents, teachers and students with information about how well individual students are doing compared to national standards. It is important that Congress act expeditiously to ensure NAGB's role in overseeing these tests.
Because of its role in overseeing NAEP, NAGB is best suited to ensure comparability between the voluntary national tests and NAEP tests. One issue that NAGB will need to address is the National Test Panel's recommendation that students be permitted to use calculators for the entire eighth grade mathematics test. NAEP permits calculators to be used on just over a quarter of the exam. In my view, a test of eighth grade students should measure, as NAEP does, whether students have learned how to do arithmetic accurately without a calculator. But a visit to any good eighth grade classroom will show students who have moved beyond arithmetic to more advanced topics -- and are using calculators to do work in algebra and geometry, such as finding square roots, exponents and other rigorous work. That is why a test of eighth grade students should also measure, as NAEP does, whether students can do advanced mathematics using calculators as a tool.
In order to ensure that test development does not proceed before NAGB assumes its new role, I will not forward the test panel's recommended specifications to the test contractor at this time. When NAGB assumes its new role, I will urge them to take the steps necessary to ensure that the specifications for the national tests are fully consistent with those for NAEP. NAGB will be responsible for the final specifications that will guide the selection of test items. The contractor will discontinue development of test items until NAGB has approved test specifications.
-###-