The justification for national standards is that test scores predict a nation's future economic success. There is no evidence that supports this assumption. There is evidence that it is wrong. For more than half a century, reformers have been trying to fix our schools with little success. The obvious conclusion is that something that can't be fixed in a half a century of reforms was not broken in the first place. The critics of the public schools also err in not recognizing the role of out-of-school factors in determining test results. One factor, parental SES, suggests that academic content is learned in school, and, moreover, that disadvantaged students learn more than middle class students, but differential learning loss when not in school more than cancels out school's greater impact on the disadvantaged. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)