Originally published in Newsweek magazine.
This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U.S. Department of Education’s explosive report “A Nation at Risk.” Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’re far from achieving the report’s ambitious aims.
The work of a national commission assembled by Secretary of Education Terrel Bell and largely written by Harvard physicist Gerald Holton, the report laid bare the troubled state of the nation’s 84,000 public schools, which had been battered during the 1970s by plunging enrollments, property-tax revolts, the spread of teacher unionism, the upheavals of desegregation andresearchers’ demoralizing declarations that family backgrounds rather than schools were the strongest influence on student achievement. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” it warned.
The report’s alarming message, Holton’s stature (and that of others on Bell’s commission) and a central, if ironic, role played in the report’s release by Ronald Reagan, vaulted school reform to the top of the national agenda. (Reagan, who had entered the White House in 1981 calling for the abolition of the newly established federal Department of Education, refused Bell’s request to establish a presidential education reform commission, refused at first to release the report at the White House, and, when Bell finally got the event on the presidential calendar, ignored the report’s recommendations in favor of topics like school prayer—only to barnstorm the nation with the report’s message for months once his aides recognized its value to his 1984 re-election.)
Suddenly, school reform was page-one news in every newspaper in the nation. Not since the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into orbit had an educational movement gripped the country with such intensity.
But Bell’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, and the authors of other school reform reports that echoed the commission’s message, didn’t merely promote improvement inpublic education. They charted public education a fundamentally different course.
A revolution was underway in the workplace. Jobs stressing brains over brawn were replacing lunch-bucket labor in an emerging post-industrial economy—a shift brought into sharp focus by a bitter recession in the early 1980s that caused massive layoffs in the industrial and manufacturing sectors.
For millions of American workers to preserve their places in the middle class, and for American businesses to stay competitive in a new economic era, public schools needed to teach a far wider range of students to a high standard, a chorus of economists, educators, governors and corporate leaders declared. “The skills that were once possessed by only a few must now be held by themany if the United States is to remain competitive in an advancing technological world,” warned an education task force of the Twentieth Century Fund.
But the argument that public schools had to give a rigorous academic education to most students was a radical proposition. It challenged a core assumption of public education dating back to the beginning of the 20th century: that the education best suited to a majority of the nation’s students after they acquired basic literacy skills in the early grades was one that emphasized not intellectual training but the acquisition of skills that had practical uses on the factory floor. For decades, public educators had embraced an emphatically utilitarian vision of public secondary schooling.
Overwhelmingly, they saw public schools as sorting machines, giving different students different educations based on assumptions about their futures. Most students, they believed, should be taught primarily to use their hands to prepare them for the blue-collar jobs that they would have. As a result, even students who stayed in high school long enough to earn diplomas in many cases were given the equivalent of eighth-grade educations.
That wasn’t good enough “A Nation at Risk” declared. The changing nature of work required public schools to teach all students to high standards through high school. And because thenation by then no longer lived in official innocence of race and class, all students included those who in the past had been largely excluded from the nation’s educational equation: students of color, English-language learners and the disabled.
So “A Nation at Risk” was not merely a school reform manifesto. It sought, in effect, a new, far more ambitious role for public education, one that would redefine the social landscape in America by giving all students the same educational opportunities. It’s not surprising, given the magnitude of that challenge, that a quarter of a century later we haven’t yet made good on the report’s promise.
“A Nation at Risk” and the other schooling manifestos of the day mostly sought regulatory reforms to strengthen teacher quality, ratchet up high-school standards, and measure student performance more rigorously. A wing of the reform movement countered the student apathy and alienation spawned by the nation’s vast, dysfunctional comprehensive high schools by reconfiguring them into smaller, more personal places where students and teachers established meaningful relationships, a strategy rekindled in recent years by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But by the end of the 1980s, striking percentages of students continued to perform at alarmingly low levels. And it was increasingly clear that local educators were not buying the notion that many students could, or even should, study at higher levels.
So state and federal policymakers, including presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, began putting pressure on the schools from the outside, establishing state education standards and national educational goals, requiring more student testing and holding educators responsible for the results—an accountability campaign that culminated in George W. Bush’s signing of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002.
Conservatives, who had swept into national leadership during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, had another solution: the marketplace. Reagan declared competition between public and private schools to be the best remedy for what ailed public education and sought to disperse billions of dollars in federal education aid through vouchers redeemable at either type of school.
Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress balked, and today only about 150,000 of the nation’s 50 million students are enrolled in a handful of voucher programs around the country. But another alternative to traditional public schools, publicly funded but independently operated charter schools, sprang up in the early 1990s as an alternative to voucher programs. Today, they enroll more than a million students, and in some cities, including Washington, D.C., they educate upward of a third of all public-school kids.
Still, 25 years worth of reform has produced only modest gains. NCLB has forced educators to pay attention to long-neglected groups of students, but it has also encouraged states to set the academic bar so low that even if students meet state standards required by the law, they are going to be only minimally educated. And the law has arguably done more harm than good for the millions of students who need to be pushed beyond the basics. Some charter schools have done fabulous work with the nation’s toughest-to-educate students, but they are struggling to replicate their success, while many other charter schools have proven to be no better than traditional public schools and in some cases worse. Organizations like Teach for America have infused a measure of talent and energy into public education, but the barriers to improving the teaching profession decried by reform manifestos of the 1980s remain.
The authors of “A Nation at Risk” called for all students to study the New Basics, a core curriculum of rigorous high-school subjects, and since then enrollment in Advanced Placement courses has expanded from 135,000 to nearly 1.5 million, while the number of schools using the demanding International Baccalaureate curriculum has increased from a few dozen to nearly 1,300. But 12th-grade reading and math scores have stagnated since the early 1990s on the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable national report card of student achievement. And by some calculations, upward of half the nation’s black and Latino students fail to graduate from high school.
We have pulled up performance at the bottom and begun to close the gaps between minority students and their white and Asian counterparts, NAEP and other measures suggest. But we’re far from reaching “A Nation at Risk’”s goal of significantly higher average achievement. And that task is only going to get tougher as the public-school population becomes more challenging. The nation’s Latino population, for example, is expected to double by 2050, accounting for most of the country’s population growth, and, as their gloomy graduation rates suggest, many Latino students struggle in public schools.
We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually, to achieve “A Nation at Risk’”s ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards (the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams are good models). And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).
But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key.
That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.
Raising student achievement is hard work. Ask any of the earnest, Teach for America-trained Ivy Leaguers who have taken on the daunting task by opening charter schools in some of the nation’s toughest urban neighborhoods in recent years. They clock 12-hour days, six days a week with millions of dollars of philanthropic support to give their disadvantaged students the extra instruction, personal attention and enrichment that they need to climb out of the educational cellar.
And there’s another, larger problem in education that makes school reform steadily more difficult: in sharp contrast to many other enterprises, schooling isn’t significantly more efficient than it was a century ago. Computing, we all know, gets steadily faster and cheaper. Schooling gets increasingly expensive because schools have to raise teachers’ salaries. But we haven’t been able to improve on the traditional model of teachers in classrooms with roughly the same numbers of students they’ve taught for generations. That’s one reason why many high-performing charter schools require infusions of philanthropy, why independent day schools have broken the $30,000 tuition barrier (they tend to have very small classes) and why Roman Catholic schools are going out of business as they are forced to replace unpaid religious faculty with lay teachers (even with large classes they can’t keep tuition low enough to attract the mostly low-income urban families they serve today, especially as competition intensifies from tuition-free charter schools).
But if achieving “A Nation at Risk’”s vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that “A Nation at Risk” envisioned.