As usual, you raise lots of interesting questions and you sharpen our clear differences. Yes, I do think we should have national testing. This idea that fifty states should each have their own standards and their own tests is nutty. We are not getting higher standards; we may even be getting lower ones.
How did we get to this point? President Clinton's Goals 2000 pushed the states to create their own standards and tests (Clinton, to his credit, actually preferred national tests, but he couldn't persuade the Republican Congress to go along with his proposal for such tests). Then along came NCLB, and President Bush wanted a bigger emphasis on standards and testing, but knew that his own party would never accept national testing. So he built on the idea that each state should set its own standards, develop its own tests, grade its own progress towards the goal of having every student "proficient" in reading and mathematics by the year 2013-2014. Since the bill passed Congress in the fall of 2001, I assume that the goal of 2013-14 was based on the idea that this was the amount of time (12 years, starting in 2002) necessary to raise the achievement of children who were then in kindergarten.
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