IN A TRUE twist of irony, the Bush Administration has managed to do something the Democrats could never do - turn the federal government into a big stick aimed at states and schools. Even President Clinton's national testing plan was to have been voluntary. Not so the accountability measures being fleshed out under President Bush's education plan. If some of these measures seem terribly intrusive all the way down to the classroom level, the culprit is not the overreaching of the national politicians, but the almost amazing lack of smarts on the part of many state and local officials and educators. They just didn't take seriously enough the demand for schools to do better, nor did they react with the kind of informed policy making that was needed. The 1994 revisions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act changed expectations and accountability substantially. They were part of an evolution of reforms, however, that had been in progress for two decades, accompanied by a body of research that provides the best resources on teaching and learning that have ever been available. Yet the response of the education sector - including high-performing and low-performing schools - has been so weak and lacking in skill and urgency that the whole enterprise could be brought to its knees by onerous testing programs. Four years after the expectations were spelled out in the 1994 federal legislation, four-fifths of the principals of Title I schools surveyed in one U.S. Department of Education (ED) study said that they could implement the reforms without extensive changes. This was true even among principals of schools that had been identified as low performing for two consecutive years. The story is even more incredible at the classroom level. Twenty-eight percent of the schools were still not using standards for instruction. While the number of schools providing extended learning time increased substantially (to almost half of the schools), only 12% of the students in Title I schools participated in such programs. Despite repeated criticism of the use of paraprofessionals for instruction, two-thirds of the schools used them, and 85% of their time was taken up with teaching. Another study outlined classroom practices in reading and math that had been shown to work better with students in the bottom quarter of their classes. These practices focused on high-quality teaching - for example, providing students with richer content, opportunities to discuss the material, and problem solving. Yet in the two years this study covered, the changes in teachers' practice tended to be away from such strategies and toward drill-and-skill activities that did not improve student achievement. Undoubtedly, such responses to standards-based reforms are at least as much the result of panic over state assessments as they are of bad teaching habits. The states had five years to construct acceptable assessment systems under the Title I requirements (for efficiency purposes, the assessment systems apply to all schools and students). And, with a gumption it had not shown earlier, the departing Clinton Administration gave most of the states a low, or at least incomplete, grade on their assessment efforts. Of the 34 reviews conducted by the end of December, only 11 states had earned full approval, 20 states were given more time to submit reports, and three states were judged to be out of compliance and required to submit redesigns. Overall, state officials stumbled most frequently over the inclusion of students with limited proficiency in English and of students with disabilities and the requirement to disaggregate the reporting of assessment data. The Title I study also found a lack of communication and action from the state level down. Thirteen percent of the Title I school principals didn't know if their schools had been identified as needing improvement; less than half of the low-performing schools had received additional professional development or technical assistance. …