When A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform was published in April of 1983 it set off a political and policy firestorm that continues to smolder today. The report was submitted by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which consisted of some the nation’s top educational leaders and chaired by David P. Gardner, president of the University of Utah.
The report did not pull punches. The commission authors famously wrote, “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. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
In the 30 years since the report, educational reform has dominated much of public life and aroused political passions at the national level. In some ways, the war imagery invoked by the report was apt but more applicable to an educational civil war that continues to rage than to an invasion from a foreign power.
Recently, six well-known AIR thought leaders including George Bohrnstedt, Beatrice Birman, David Osher, Jennifer O’Day, Terry Salinger, and Jane Hannaway posted blogs on the AIR website about A Nation at Risk. Gary Phillips, AIR Vice President and AIR Institute Fellow, joins these thinkers with his blog, “Why Local Educators Haven’t Heeded the Warnings in A Nation at Risk,” which we’ve reposted on The Quick & the Ed. He points out that while many education and policy leaders continue to sound alarm bells not unlike those hear in A Nation at Risk, much of the rest of the country is not really listening.
He suggests that part of the explanation for this difference in perception is the gap between the overall proficiency scores as measured by states and those proficiency scores as measured by international comparisons such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
In Tennessee, for example, state tests indicate the 90 percent of 4th -graders are proficient in math while TIMSS indicated that only 29 percent are proficient. Generally, public opinion polls show that while most Americans think public education is underperforming nationally, they believe their local school is quite good. Despite the predictions of catastrophe found in A Nation at Risk, most Americans have faith in the school next door. This is one of the paradoxes of the reform movement today and no doubt is one of the silent causes of our tendency to reform over and over again—the view from the Capital and the view from the grassroots can be quite different.
Read Gary Phillips’ post “Why Local Educators Haven’t Heeded the Warnings in A Nation at Risk.”