Rove In a week dominated by health care, President Barack Obama released a set of education proposals that break with ideals once articulated by Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy’s view was that accountability is essential to educating every child.

He exp ressed this view in 1965, while supporting an education reform initia- tive, saying “I do not think money in and of itself is necessarily the answer” to educational excellence.

Instead, he hailed “good faith ... effort to hold educators responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the touchstone of success.”

But rather than raising standards, the Obama administration is proposing to gut No Child Left Behind’s accountability framework.

Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires that every school be held responsible for student achievement. Under the new proposal, up to 90 percent of schools can escape responsibility. Only 5 percent of the lowestperforming schools will be required to take action to raise poor test scores.

And another 5 percent will be given a vague “warning” to shape up, but it is not clear what will happen if they don’t.

Obama would judge schools not by whether they were meeting reading and math standards, but primarily by a more amorphous standard: whether they are producing “college-ready and career-ready” students.

Abandoning goals for students to reach grade-level performance and promising that instead kids will be made “college-ready” is like promising someone they’ll be able to run the marathon without first determining if they can run a mile.

Communities already know local graduation rates and, in most instances, how many students go on to college.

But these aren’t effective metrics for fixing failing schools because by the time a student drops out of high school, it is nearly too late to provide him a quality education.

The value of the current accountability regime is that it pinpoints students at risk early in the process.

Teachers unions, which are deeply opposed to measurements and accountability, condemn NCLB for forcing schools to “teach to the test.”

But what’s wrong with measuring a child’s ability to learn and gauge whether they have reading and math skills appropriate to their age? “Teaching to the test” means providing students the underlying skills they need to pass any test. The same is true, by the way, when it comes to the SAT or ACT.

Testing is also important because it builds political pressure for reform. When presented with test data showing that schools are failing, parents demand change.

Education reform is one of the rare opportunities for bipartisan cooperation the White House has not squandered.

Karl Rove is former senior advisor to President George W. Bush.