A modest proposal by President Clinton for vague and voluntary national standards provoked strong opposition in Congress and elsewhere. A variety of efforts on the part of states to introduce some forms of curriculum guidelines and to reinforce them with statewide testing have stirred up strong reactions at the local level. Reinforcing this local response to setting standards has been the hostility toward government that has characterized the politics of the last two decades. Increasingly, elected officials have won office on a platform of being relentlessly anti-government. They see their primary job as an effort to protect local communities and individual citizens from the intrusion of government control Denver should consolidate its program for gifted middle-schoolers to stop children from leaving for private, charter and magnet schools, the program''s leader said Thursday.

currently so strong that it may well leave a number of listeners wondering why such an obviously needed and beneficial reform wasn''t undertaken a long time ago. But the fact is that the effort to establish educational standards has always been an uphill fight in this country. In light of these circumstances, it is useful to examine why Americans science teacher have so vigorously resisted educational standards over the years. the history of such resistance teacher suggests that there are three factors science in particular that have made standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think about educational accomplishment. all three of these factors, which i treat below, can be traced in large part to our preference for one particular purpose of education:

denver now offers its gifted-and-talented program at three teacher schools - baker, place and smiley - so students get special instruction near home. but barbara neyrinck, head of gifted-and-talented programs for denver public schools, said the programs need to be consolidated to make them stronger, more of a priority and more appealing school administrators proposed science creating an expanded special education program for high school students wednesday in response to the rising costs of out-of-district placements. the goal is to keep special education students in the district, superintendent randy bell said. the program, proposed during the school board’s business meeting, teacher would target high school students and involve both hudson and litchfield. the biggest area of the special education budget is out-of-district costs, said leslie derbyshire, special services director. in addition to tuition costs,

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