Twenty years ago this fall, I joined the Peace Corps. Posted as an English teacher in Nepal, I arrived with a characteristic American blend of zeal and naivete. Rather than simply drilling my students in the required curriculum, I resolved, I would teach them how to think.
Yet whenever I introduced a game or a song -- or anything outside of the official course of study -- the students bridled. "Sir," they complained, "this is not on the SLC."
The SLC was the School Leaving Certificate examination, which all Nepalese had to pass to qualify for higher education and lucrative government jobs. Although Nepal was never colonized by the West, its school system closely resembled neighboring India and other former imperial outposts. To get anywhere in life, you had to get past the SLC.
My Peace Corps friends and I often commiserated about the evils of the test. It made students anxious; it encouraged rote instruction; it fostered cheating. As I wrote in a letter home, the SLC was "the worst educational legacy that Europe gave to the world."
Little did I know that the U.S. would embrace this legacy two decades later. At last count, 24 U.S. states require or plan to require that students pass exit exams to earn high school diplomas. Under President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, meanwhile, states will have to administer annual tests in six elementary and junior high grades. In our schools, the U.S. is becoming more like Donald Rumsfeld's "Old Europe" than many of us care to admit.
Remember Old Europe? For the most part, Bush and Rumsfeld would prefer that you forgot it. On issues from arms control and the environment to the World Court and the war in Iraq, the White House has repeatedly flouted or ignored our putative allies across the Atlantic.
When it comes to education, however, the U.S. has moved in a remarkably European direction. Bush and his followers have demanded public vouchers for parochial schools, a mainstay of many European democracies for a century. Most of all, though, both the federal government and the states are requiring new high-stakes tests that put Old Europe to shame.
Consider two children, one who grows up in Massachusetts and another in Britain. Already, to graduate from high school, the Massachusetts student must pass the English and math portions of the state's school-leaving test. Starting with the 2005-06 school year, federal law will require her to take reading and math exams every year from third grade through eighth. Her school will have to report its annual results; if it does not show sufficient improvement, she will become eligible to transfer elsewhere.
