Today a group of business leaders will gather at the White House to endorse President Clinton’s effort to establish national education standards. Shouldn’t we have learned by now the danger of embracing national standards when we have no notion of what form they’ll take?

Not long ago, President Bush and the ambitious head of the National Governor’s Association, Bill Clinton, emerged from an education summit in Charlottesville, Va., with what seemed to many a terrific plan: “world-class standards” for U.S. schools. But several years and millions of taxpayer dollars later, when the experts came forth with the details, standards no longer seemed like such a good idea. Ninety-nine members of the U.S. Senate voted to reject history standards that would have students learning more about Joseph McCarthy than George Washington, more about the Indian chief Speckled Snake than Thomas Edison.

So how is it that today President Clinton’s plans for national standards for fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics are proceeding so smoothly? Otherwise-sensible politicians are backing the proposal even though the details are unknown and the few things one can speculate about are not reassuring.

The president has given his proposal an aura of specificity by promising to model the new standards on the respected the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But because the NAEP tests are not intended to measure every child in the nation, they will have to be overhauled. The Department of Education intends to award contracts worth some $9 million a year over the next few years to groups outside the government to rework the tests. Therein lies the danger: If those groups are so inclined, they can turn out a product that differs significantly from the model, just as outside groups did in the last round of standard-setting.

Mr. Clinton tries to allay such concerns by suggesting that in reading and math--as opposed to controversial subjects like history--universal agreement prevails about what students should know and be tested for. “From Maryland to Michigan to Montana,” he said recently, “reading is reading and math is math.”

Apparently the president has not heard of “whole language” instruction, an approach to reading and writing that has created firestorms in several states, most notably California. Whole-language teachers focus on student “empowerment.” They prefer not to talk about student errors, but about “approximate spelling.” They also don’t talk much about phonics, one of those dreaded instructional techniques requiring drill and memorization.

Although common sense and recent research argue against whole-language instruction, it has powerful advocates, including the National Council of Teachers of English, a group sure to have influence in the development of a reading test. Since it is impossible to imagine the process going forward without the NCTE, it is quite possible to imagine a national reading test in which it matters not a whit to students’ scores if their answers are full of spelling and grammatical errors.

Even mathematics is vulnerable to such fashionable nonsense. In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics set forth standards embodying what one might call “whole math” instruction. As powerful in its field as the NCTE is in English, the NCTM lambasted “a long-standing preoccupation with computation and other traditional skills,” which makes students into “passive receivers of rules and procedures rather than active participants in creating knowledge.” The council’s standards urged that drill, practice and memorization be downplayed in favor of “number sense,” “operation sense” and “cooperative work.” Parents in at least four states have blamed the NCTM standards for inadequately fostering math literacy. Given the NCTM’s likely role in developing a national test in eighth-grade mathematics, parents across the country could soon be irate. Worse, in the absence of other tests, a national examination that downplayed skills like computation might well disguise student inadequacies, which would be very bad news indeed.

A third group that could play a role in developing tests is the National Center for Education and the Economy. With $20 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the NCEE has been at work for the past few years on standards and assessments for fourth-, eighth-, and 10th-graders. Thus it is very well positioned to influence any new standards--and well connected, too. Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner are among those who have served on its board. Mike Cohen, formerly NCEE executive director, is now chief education adviser at the White House.

Undersecretary of Education Mike Smith has worked closely with the NCEE. Like Robert Schwartz, then head of educational giving for the Pew Foundation, Mr. Smith was among those whom NCEE president Marc Tucker brought together right after the 1992 election to advise Mrs. Clinton. After the meeting Mr. Tucker wrote an 18-page letter to “Dear Hillary” advising that the Clintons aim to “remold the entire American system” of education and training. Crucial to spinning a “seamless web” of education and labor policy that would envelop all Americans “from cradle to grave,” Mr. Tucker wrote, are “clear national standards of performance.”

Mr. Tucker’s letter offers vivid support to those who worry that the Clinton reading and math tests are merely the first step on a path toward central control of all aspects of education. Many of those who have come out in support of the Clinton proposal would no more approve of this idea than they would of approximate spelling; but, as the last round of standard-setting showed, what is proposed in the beginning may bear little relationship to what results in the end.