As Congress moves to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act as early as this year, at least one topic will be high on the list: increasing the rigor of state standards and tests by linking them to those set at the national level...

On Monday, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, the committee's second-ranking Democrat and a potential presidential contender, introduced a bipartisan bill with Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, R-Mich., that would go a step further by providing incentives for states to adopt voluntary "American education content standards" in mathematics and science, to be developed by the governing board for NAEP...

Incentives for States

The Dodd-Ehlers bill, the Standards to Provide Educational Achievement for all Kids, or SPEAK Act, would require the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, to create voluntary national education standards in math and science for grades K-12 and ensure that they are internationally competitive. States could compete for grants of up to $4 million each to adopt the math and science standards as the core of their own state content standards.

States that won the awards would have to align their state tests in math and science with the standards and with NAEP achievement levels in those subjects. They also would have to align teacher licensure, preparation, and professional-development requirements with the new standards.

As a further incentive to adopt the voluntary national standards, the bill would permit the U.S. secretary of education to extend the 2014 deadline for states to get all students to the proficient level on state reading and math tests under the NCLB law by up to four years. In addition, states that fulfilled the grant requirements would be eligible for additional bonus grants, equal to 5 percent of their Title I allocation under the federal law, to develop data systems that can track individual student performance over time...

'An Inexorable March'?

"The country is on an inexorable march toward national education standards," said Michael Dannenberg, the director of the education policy program at the Washington-based New America Foundation. "The question is no longer if, but when and how."

At the Monday event, which was co-sponsored by New America Foundation, Sen. Dodd played down differences between the two bills, saying that there are a variety of bills focused on raising education standards "is very encouraging..."

For the complete article, please visit the Education Week website.