Opinion

LEADING A RACE TO THE TOP

SECRETARY of Education Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top Fund” offers New York a tremendous opportunity to take a good, hard look at the standards we’ve set for our schools and lead a national movement for higher standards for our nation’s 49 million public-school children.

New York has always been a national leader in setting rigorous standards for our students. More than a century before standards caught on across the country, New York devised a system to give employers and the public confidence in the high-school diploma. From 1878 onward, the state administered Regents examinations to high-school students in topics ranging from chemistry to Homer’s Iliad.

Our high-school curriculum has evolved over time, but our commitment remains the same: ensuring that our schools are preparing students for the challenges of higher education, employment and citizenship. In the last decade, we extended this challenge to our elementary- and middle-school students by setting high standards for what our students should know and be able to do and testing them to measure their progress.

Our investment has paid off handsomely for New York’s schoolchildren. In 2008, four out of every five of our students in grades 3 through 8 met state standards in math, and more than two out of every three met the standards in English Language Arts. Our elementary students in particular have excelled; 90 percent of our state’s 3rd graders met state standards in math in 2008.

But New Yorkers have never been satisfied to rest on our laurels. That’s why we should embrace Secretary Duncan’s “Race to the Top” challenge.

The program will fund a group of states willing to do the hard work needed to dramatically increase students’ performance. Here in New York, it can help us confront the troubling gaps we see when we compare our students’ performance on state tests with their performance on national tests.

Adopting a national standard for proficiency would put to rest once and for all the annual debate on whether our state test was “harder” or “easier” this year, and restore public confidence in the validity of our state test results.

In 2007, the last year that the National Assessment of Educational Progress was administered, almost twice as many of our 4th graders were proficient on our state math test as were proficient on the national test — 80 percent versus 43 percent. These disparities are especially striking for our state’s African-American and Hispanic students. Only 10 percent of our state’s black 8th graders met national standards for proficiency in math, while 35 percent met our state standards in the same year.

Gaps between state and national test scores are more pronounced across the country. For example, just 5 percent of Michigan’s black 8th graders are proficient in math as measured by the national test, yet 50 percent score as “proficient” on that state’s standards. It’s time for state education leaders to rise to the challenge set out by President Obama and Secretary Duncan and adopt a national standard for proficiency.

The central promise of the No Child Left Behind Act was that citizens, whether they lived in New York, Michigan or California, would have a transparent portrait of how our children are doing in school. It’s a promise that we have a responsibility to keep.

Merryl Tisch was recently named chancellor of New York’s Board of Regents.