President Clinton had been trying to institute a national test for schoolchildren, to permit, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "interested parties to judge relative progress." Objections had been raised from many points on the political spectrum, and on many grounds (principally interference with local control, and the inherent inadequacy of standardized tests). A high-octane session with two deeply knowledgeable guests. NL: "When ETS [the Educational Testing Service] was founded, the man who was the first president kept a diary.... And one of the things he wrote in his diary right as it was starting was: 'These tests will be for the 20th century what the standard gauge was for railroads in the 19th century.' It's a way of creating--" WFB: "Procrusteanization." NL: "It creates a national market in personnel.... And the other [thing the tests do] ... is being a diagnostic tool to be used to improve education. On the first measure they have worked out fabulously well. On the second measure they haven't worked that well." ... BS: "We already have widely used achievement tests across this country--the Stanfords, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the California Achievement Test--which have identified how schools are performing. The task before this nation is not to measure it again, particularly not to measure it with low-level tools, which do dumb down education for everybody, because the schools focus on what they measure, and what you test for is what you get."