Still at Risk

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 and researchers' 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 in public 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 the many 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.