WASHINGTON, D.C.—To some federal bureaucrats it doesn’t matter that Congress prohibited a national education test in 1998. The mission creep of a federal program known as NAEP is fueling concerns that a national test looms in the future, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association said today on Capitol Hill.

Christopher Klicka, speaking to the Early Childhood, Youth and Families Subcommittee of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said that a national test would, of necessity, mean a national curriculum. A national curriculum would prevent parents and teachers from tailoring instruction to the needs of their pupils.

Klicka and other critics have charged that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) continues to grow beyond its original mission to evaluate student development in math and science, branching into values-laden academic areas such as art, history and economics.

Parental rights advocates fear that National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees NAEP, will redesign the NAEP assessments into national test. This would put all decision-making powers into the hands of Washington bureaucrats, Klicka explained. It would also eliminate the flexibility parents and instructors require to teach each child according to individual needs.

“The direction is clear. The expansion of NAEP and NAGB is leading us into a nationalizing of education testing and standards that will by default, lead to a national curriculum,” Klicka said. Home school families across the country “do not want national education standards and testing dictated by the federal Department of Education. Home schoolers and a majority of Americans want local control of education.”

Determining educational assessments is the same thing as controlling curriculum development, Klicka said. “There is no real distinction, because national assessment frameworks created by NAGB will dictate a national curriculum framework. What gets tested is what gets taught.”