The Clinton administration’s new education initiative brings a sticky challenge for the president: how to combine his cherished role of National Empathizer and Repairer of the Breach with the unavoidably painful business of enforcing standards? When kids start taking the new math and reading tests, won’t some of them fail?
Never fear. In Annapolis last week, the president proved once more that his agility can be relied on. “Keep in mind,” he explained, “we don’t want Johnny to make a better score than Mary on this test; we want 100 percent of our kids to pass this test. And then when a lot of them don’t, we don’t want to give them an F, we want to give them a hand up. We want to say we haven’t done what we should and we’re going to do this.”
So that’s what having high standards means.
