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As Kevin Kosar recently wrote, if a few years ago someone suggested that the federal government would enact legislation creating national academic standards, they’d have been thought crazy. After all, as anyone familiar with disastrous voluntary national testing proposals in the 1990s will tell you, national standards are political poison. Americans cherish local control of schooling far too much, and couldn’t agree on the standards even if they wanted them nationalized.

But that was then. Today, with state efforts to implement tough standards foundering, and the No Child Left Behind Act proving as much a force for lowering standards as boosting them, the idea of having Washington set standards for everyone has gathered steam. Indeed, at this very moment a bill to create national math and science standards is in the congressional pipeline.

The Standards to Provide Educational Achievement for All Kids (SPEAK) Act was unveiled to significant fanfare by its Senate sponsor, and presidential candidate, Chris Dodd (D-CT) a few weeks ago, and has been getting appreciable consideration from education policy folks. If enacted, the Act would require the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) – which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – to create standards in science and math that states could “voluntarily” adopt in exchange for a slice of a $400 million pie.

Of course, just because this bill exists doesn’t mean it has a chance of passage. But Kosar thinks its prospects for avoiding the political pitfalls that have foiled past national standards proposals are pretty good.

“The bill is adroitly drafted,” Kosar says. “It is a clever proposal that does its darnedest to avoid politics. For one, the national standards would be voluntary. For another, the standards are not created de novo; rather, they must be based on the NAEP frameworks that guide the NAEP evaluations.”

Kosar could very well be right about the Act’s chances of passage. For one thing, even though the bill actually calls for NAGB to create new math and science standards, the public could easily believe that it will just take NAEP’s current standards, as well as its achievement levels, and let states adopt them. For another, SPEAK sticks to math and science, avoiding the ultra-divisive subject of history. Finally, the public might very well accept the “voluntary” label because states don’t have to take federal money, and hence federal standards.

The fundamental problem with the SPEAK Act, however, is not that it can’t overcome the politics of passage. The problem is that neither it, nor any other national standards bill, can likely ever overcome the far more pernicious politics of implementation, in which, like NCLB, all the standards pressure is pointed downward.

Here’s what’s likely to happen with any national standards legislation: While parents will fight hard for high standards during the battle to pass the law, they won’t be able to keep on fighting once implementation begins. They simply have no full-time Washington advocacy groups to do the day-to-day fighting over regulatory and bureaucratic minutiae necessary to keep implementation on track. The school administrators, education bureaucrats, and teachers whose feet would be held to the fire by high standards, however, have Washington advocates aplenty to push standards down and make their jobs as easy as possible.

It’s a reality as old as the ESEA itself. As RAND Corporation researcher Milbrey McLaughlin concluded about Title I back in 1975:

The teachers, administrators, and others whose salaries are paid by Title I, or whose budgets are balanced by its funds, are….a more powerful constituency than those poor parents who are disillusioned by its unfulfilled promise.

Importantly, the main reason SPEAK would vest standards-setting power in NAGB is to minimize downward political pressures, reasoning that NAGB is better insulated from politics then, say, the department of education. And right now, it is. But other than embarrassing states when they do poorly on NAEP tests, nothing NAGB currently does has concrete implications for state and local education officials. Attach dollars to NAEP, however, and political sites will suddenly be set on NAGB. Indeed, even with no great consequences attached to its work, over the years NAGB has been under regular threat of politicization. As Checker Finn – a national standards advocate – warned back in 2000:

Unfortunately, the past decade has…shown how vulnerable these activities are to all manner of interference, manipulation, political agendas, incompetence and simple mischief. It turns out that they are nowhere near to being adequately immunized against Washington’s three great plagues:

* The pressing political agendas and evanescent policy passions of elected officials…and their appointees and aides.

* The depredations and incursions of self-serving interest groups and lobbyists….

* Plain old bureaucratic bungling and incompetence.

The second major implementation problem is that adopting the SPEAK Act’s standards would be no more voluntary for states than participating in any federal education activity. As long as Washington can take taxpayers’ money against their will, telling state legislators that they can only get federal money by “voluntarily” adopting federal standards makes state participation, for all intents and purposes, mandatory. Very few state legislators will tell their constituents that they’re turning down cash that came from their constituents to begin with.

Kosar notes that SPEAK only dangles “a measly $4 million” in front of individual states, which he thinks will dissuade many of them from “volunteering.” But that figure is just the grant that states would get for joining up; the legislation also promises unspecified amounts to participating states so that they can do such things as “enhance statewide student level longitudinal data systems.” And, of course, funding levels for federal programs almost always seem to rise.

In the end, Kevin Kosar might be right that the political winds are a-changin’ and that national standards might soon overcome the obstacles that have doomed their passage in the past. It is highly unlikely, however, that they’ll ever overcome the much more destructive politics of implementation.

Neal McCluskey is a policy analyst with Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom.