问答题 81. By now it's hardly news that as education has risen to the top of the national agenda, a great wave of school reform has focused on two related objectives: more-stringent academic standards and increasingly rigorous accountability for both students and schools.
82. In state after state, legislatures, governors, and state boards, supported by business leaders, have imposed tougher requirements in math, English, science, and other fields, together with new tests by which the performance of both students and schools is to be judged. In some places students have already been denied diplomas or held back in grade if they failed these tests. 83. In some states funding for individual schools and for teachers' and principals' salaries -- and in some, such as Virginia, the accreditation of schools -- will depend on how well students do on tests. More than half the states now require tests for student promotion or graduation.
But a backlash has begun.
84. In Virginia this spring parents, teachers, and school administrators opposed to the state's Standard of Learning assessments, established in 1998, inspired a flurry_ of bills in the legislature that called for revising the tests of their status as unavoidable hurdles for promotion and graduation. One bill would also have required that each new member of the sate board of education "take the eighth grade Standards of Learning assessments in English, mathematics, science, and social sciences" and that "the results of such assessments.., be publicly reported."
85. None of the bills passed, but there's little doubt that if the system isn't revised and the state's high failure rates don't decrease by 2004, when the first Virginia senior may be denied diplomas, the political pressure will intensify. Meanwhile, some parents are talking about Massachusetts-style boycotts.