Seven years ago, when President George Bush tried to make political hay out of the release of national education statistics, a Washington Post story carried this snippy lead:
"Maybe President Bush doesn't read enough. In the fine print of an education report Bush released this week lies this instruction: 'Public reporting and release of [the education report] shall be apolitical.' But Wednesday, on a trip that included a $ 2,500-a-plate fund-raiser, the president released . . . "
Lately, though, the Post doesn't seem nearly as vigilant. In fact, it hasn't even noticed that Al Gore is now doing the same thing. In February, the commissioner of education statistics was all set to announce the latest national reading scores at a long-planned press conference, when Gore hijacked the event, packing the auditorium with education lobbyists and bureaucrats, inviting a first-grade teacher from Fairfax, Va., to make some remarks, and urging Congress to "enact the Clinton-Gore education agenda." Gore left without taking questions from the press.
Although the Post was mute, the New York Times did note, deep in its story, that the event was "more political than usual." The chairman of the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Mark D. Musick, noted this, too, and has lodged a complaint with the commissioner of education statistics. As he wrote in his letter of Feb. 18, unless NAEP results are insulated from politics, "people won't believe them."
On the national level, NAEP is one of the few education success stories. Too bad the Clinton administration seems determined to sully it along with everything else.