A TEMPEST OVER NATIONAL TESTING

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The trouble with Congressional Republicans isn't that they like a good fight--it's the fights they like to pick. Time and again, most notably during the government shutdown in 1995, the Clinton Administration has beat up on G.O.P. lawmakers and in the end subjected them to painful public embarrassment. So when House Republicans forced a showdown last week with the President over his treasured plan for national math and reading tests for students--despite a White House threat to veto an entire spending bill if the testing money was not included--it seemed on the face of it that these guys were just gluttons for punishment.

After all, the President's proposal to develop voluntary fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math tests by 1999 has enjoyed public support since its unveiling last February. Education experts agree that American public schools badly need tougher--and higher--national standards. National testing would enable parents and schools from Cambridge, Mass., to Compton, Calif., to measure an individual student's performance against a common yardstick. A well-executed national testing system might also ease the transition to charter schooling and public-school choice by providing a standard method of assessing different schools' strengths. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, a majority of adults surveyed said they support the President's testing plan.

Another knockout for the White House, right? Well, no. Even as the testing issue has charged to the top of the President's fall agenda, the ranks of those charging behind him have oddly dwindled, as former allies splinter into bickering special-interest groups and switch to the enemy camp. Only seven states have signed on to the plan. In the House, an improbable coalition of social conservatives and progressive Democrats were at week's end on the verge of stripping a $279 billion education bill of all its national-test money. That forced the Administration to scramble for a compromise in the Senate; to save the testing money in that version of the bill, the White House agreed to turn over control of the tests to an independent agency. And the tests might still get axed when the two chambers reconcile their respective bills next month. "Americans have asked us for common-sense education ideas," says Republican Bill Goodling of Pennsylvania, the leader of the House antitesting insurgents, "not poorly designed federal tests created by Washington bureaucrats."

How did this happen to a seemingly popular idea? From the start, powerful conservative organizations like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum derided the very notion of national examinations, claiming they violate a cherished American ideal of local-school control. Worse, they warned, the national tests would lead to homogenized classroom curriculums and ultimately to federal educrats wresting control of American classrooms from parents, teachers and students. Says Jennifer Marshall, an analyst with the Family Research Council: "We don't think there is such a thing as a good federal test."