The report that started the assault on public education
Bracey, Gerald W.
IN APRIL 1983, the U.S. Department of Education published A Nation at Risk, (ANAR) a "landmark" report lamenting the condition of American public education. It was the culmination of criticism...
...The word "proficient" just hangs there, although the reference is clearly to proficient as defined by our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP...
...Not ascribing the economic turnaround to school improvement struck some as hypocritical...
...Finally, fear is the driving force for many of America's operations...
...The epilogue indicates that the American boy gets a full scholarship to Purdue in computer graphics, while the American girl enters Indiana University with a double major, Spanish and pre-med...
...performance in an international study meant "An 'F' in World Competition...
...Too bad...
...They have to be super grinds...
...That year, too, the Washington Post quoted Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) as saying that the study was a "clear warning that even good schools are not properly preparing students for world competition...
...Team member and University of Illinois professor Herbert Walberg returned saying, "I think it's portable...
...But President Dwight Eisenhower wanted the Russians to be first to 80 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 establish the precedent that deep space was international...
...they have been rejected by the Government Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the Center for Research in Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, as well as individual psychometricians...
...Why should the ability of nine- and thirteenyear-olds to bubble in answer sheets for multiple-choice tests bear on the economy...
...Department of Education, the report said not one word about those...
...Former Federal Communications Commission chair Reed Hundt reports that Secretary of Education Bennett said he wasn't interested in improving the public schools, but in replacing them with private schools and vouchers...
...The United States was close behind with 31 percent...
...The crucial question the report failed to ask was this: If students in other nations sat for our NAEP tests, how many countries would have a majority of their students proficient in reading, mathematics, and science...
...And only that trend appeared in the report...
...We almost missed the wretched legacy of A Nation at Risk unleashed a quarter-century ago...
...The American kids don't treat school all that seriously, and they have jobs, and they have fun...
...The United States took over #1 from Japan in the Institute for Management Development Competitiveness rankings in 1994 and has remained there ever since...
...This question can be answered because we have scores for American students on NAEP and on Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and TIMSS scores for students in forty-four other nations...
...Today's economic problems might well be due to schooling, but if so, they are the result of business schools' failing to instill an appropriate code of ethics in entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, and bankers...
...Now it's fear of terrorists, a fear stoked by the Bush administration...
...This makes it possible to estimate their scores on NAEP...
...Japan's economic failures revealed the key assertion of A Nation at Risk—that high test scores produce economic growth—to be an illusion...
...Not one media outlet ran the story...
...In the 1980s, Japan had all the answers and now China and India threaten to annihilate us economically...
...Only economic reforms accomplished that in 2005...
...At Stanford University, Larry Cuban's jaundiced eye saw it this way: For the last decade, U.S...
...Attorney General Ed Meese and other conservatives complained that while Reagan's education agenda consisted of vouchers, tuition tax credits, restoring school prayer and eliminating the U.S...
...WHATEVER IS happening in the rest of the world, our schools remain awful in the eyes of the media and fearmongers...
...Meese urged Reagan not to sign it...
...For example, it stated that "there was a steady decline in the science achievement of 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments...
...Gumption and willpower, that's the key...
...But the United States is #1 in the global competitiveness rankings published each year by the World Economic Forum and has been for some time...
...You remember Japan, For a while, it was widely held in Japan that the emperor's palace and grounds were worth more than the entire state of California...
...Microsoft's Bill Gates's 2005 speech to the National Governors Association found him "terrified" for our future when he compared our schools to those he saw abroad...
...They urged acceptance...
...No one else paid any attention...
...February 2007 saw the U.S...
...The mediocrities who graduated about twentyfive years ago are now, on average, forty-seven years old...
...If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have taken it as an act of war...
...But fear of falling out of first place is also a powerful force even though it is a foolish one: America invented the computer chip and the whole world benefited...
...In the 1980s Americans had genuflected before Japan's economy and education system...
...The video tracks a boy and a girl each in India, China, and the United States...
...Beyond that, some people are not interested in improving them...
...As the movie explicitly says, they have no options...
...If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our education system...
...Even the publication that nominates itself as "Education's newspaper of record," Education Week, ignored it for two months, covering it only after someone in Europe sent a copy to an Ed Week reporter...
...They continue to be used because much political mileage comes from bashing schools...
...Had Cuban included international data, he could have observed that the vaunted Japanese economy was no more...
...No one speaks for the schools...
...I felt really sorry for the Indian and Chinese students...
...Fearsome cold-warrior rhetorical flourishes opened the document: "Our Nation is at risk . . . the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people...
...But there was no such science decline for nine- or thirteen-yearolds, the other ages tested in the national assessments...
...Richard Rothstein, a research analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, conducted a similar analysis of forty-five countries and found zero—ZERO!—in reading...
...most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics...
...Japanese kids continued to ace tests but that couldn't goose the economy out of stagnation DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 81 RECLAIMING EDUCATION or outright recession...
...Gary Phillips, a former acting commissioner of education statistics at the National Center RECLAIMING EDUCATION for Education Statistics and now with the American Institutes for Research, answered that question in a 2007 report: Five countries in mathematics and two in science...
...Moderates like chief of staff James Baker and adviser Mike Deaver argued that the report contained too much campaign fodder to ignore...
...In 1994, when the boom was obvious to one and all ("The American Economy: Back On Top" said the New York Times), Louis Gerstner, then chief executive officer of IBM, took to the op-ed page of the Times with an essay headlined, "Our Schools Are Failing...
...A Nation at Risk was a golden treasury of spun statistics...
...True...
...DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 83...
...That kids all over the world are not proficient in reading and math does not signal a global crisis in education...
...There have been two international reading comparisons since then, in 2001 and 2006, and American students have done well on both...
...Among thirty-one nations testing fourteen-year-olds, only eight had higher scores, and only Finland had a statistically significantly higher score (meaning we can have some confidence that that difference did not occur by chance...
...Reading this, I tried to imagine the totally improbable scene where Gates arrives in France and his hosts declare, "Ooh-la-la, Monsieur Gates, do we have a bad school to show you...
...No visiting guest anywhere is ever shown bad schools, so this scene exists only in my imagination...
...It signals once again that the NAEP achievement levels—"basic," "proficient," and "advanced"—are totally unrealistic...
...The report split the Reagan White House...
...Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress jointly releasing a study called Leaders and Laggards...
...Fred Hechinger, then the education writer for the New York Times, pointed out that in times of crisis, the blame is allocated to the institutions least capable of fighting back...
...In 2007, Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, with the chair of Intel, the former governor of West Virginia, and the president of the Business Roundtable, announced that we were in trouble because our scores were soso and, "Our students' performance today is the best predictor of our competitiveness tomorrow...
...GERALD W. BRACEY writes two monthly columns on educational research and policy (Phi Delta Kappan and Principal Leadership) and is the author of The War Against America's Public Schools, Setting the Record Straight, and The Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools...
...Other national assessments gave no hint of decline for any of the three ages tested in reading and mathematics...
...Why is it now with a bustling economy, rising productivity, and shrinking unemployment, American public schools are not receiving credit for the turnaround...
...But when the country slipped into the recession that would cost George H. W. Bush his second term, they claimed that lousy schools were producing a lousy workforce that was killing us in the global marketplace...
...Two Million Minutes," a 2007 fearmongering video made by venture capitalist Robert Compton, purportedly shows that we are threatened by India and China (two million minutes is approximately the amount of elapsed time from the start of ninth grade to the end of the senior year...
...No surprise here...
...Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, who had commissioned A Nation at Risk, dispatched assistant secretary of education Chester Finn and a bevy of education policy wonks to Japan to figure out how we might import Japan's educational system, as if it were a commodity no different than rice or television sets...
...The commissioners assembling ANAR thus had nine national assessment trend lines (three ages by three subjects), only one of which could support crisis rhetoric...
...Presidents, corporate leaders, and critics have blasted public schools for a globally less competitive economy, sinking productivity, and jobs lost to other nations...
...Early on, the report declares, "The measures of our education shortcomings are stark indeed...
...In 2006, Tough Choices or Tough Times, a report issued by the National Center on Education and the Economy, called for revolutionary changes in the schools, but its analyses were so silly it was derided on the right and left alike...
...Attacks from business and industry are mostly matters of power—who will have political control over schools...
...In 1967, the schools were blamed for the nation's urban riots...
...A 1992 reading study found that only Finland, of twenty-seven nations, exceeded the scores of American nine-year-olds...
...But when they got the same score in 2006 as 2001, the Education Week headline ran, "America Idles on International Reading Test...
...TRINK ABOUT that for a minute...
...They won...
...Who would notice if the schools did get better...
...But after 1988, Japan's economy sank into the Pacific Ocean, taking the other "Asian Tiger" economies with it...
...Critics did not credit economic growth in the 1990 to improved schools...
...The media and the public blamed schools for letting the Russians hurtle into space first when, in fact, the United States had quietly had a satellite-capable rocket in the air more than a year earlier...
...So why hasn't the country imploded...
...Only one-third of Swedish kids, the highest scoring nation, were proficient in reading...
...When the report was rolled out, John Podesta, head of the center declared that it was "unconscionable" that not one state had a majority of kids proficient in reading or math...
...Although the report's conclusions rested on quicksand, it launched an unprecedented orgy of school bashing that continues unabated today...
...In 2000, former secretary of education Wil8 2 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 Liam Bennett told the Heritage Foundation, "In America today, the longer you stay in school the dumber you get relative to your peers in other developed nations...
...How on earth did these poorly educated laggards manage to produce in the 1990s and early 2000s the longest sustained economic expansion in the nation's history...
...In 1996, many media outlets examined the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study and pronounced American kids "mediocre...
...It was the culmination of criticism that had been mounting since early in the cold war and had gained traction when the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957...
...Why should we care whether someone in Bangalore or Baltimore creates an AIDS vaccine...
...He maintains the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency Web site and blogs several times a week for the Huffington Post...
...In 1992, Newsweek declared that U.S...
...It is 'oreeble...
...Of course, if that were true, the country would have become a basketcase shortly after A Nation at Risk appeared in 1983...
...They used similar selectivity for RECLAIMING EDUCATION other statistics and contentions...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
