Twenty years ago, after a bitter dispute among White House insiders, Ronald
Reagan
officially accepted A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,
a report
delivered to Reagan by secretary of education Terrel Bell through his National
Commission
on Excellence in Education.
The report played big in the media—28 articles in the Washington Post alone—but
it had
more use as a political tract. The White House m oderates, especially James
Baker and
Michael Deaver, thought the report contained many issues on which Reagan
could
campaign. Indeed, the commissioners soon came to feel they had been used
to further
political ends, notably Reagan's reelection in 1984. For his part, Bell
in later years noted
that the report stole the education issue from the Democrats and that Reagan's
speeches
about the importance of education served as cover for his cuts in welfare,
aid to dependent
children, Medicaid and other social programs.
Any students who were in first grade when
A Nation at Risk appeared and who went
directly from high school graduation into
the work force have now been there
almost nine years. Those who went on to
bachelor's degrees have been on the job
for nearly five years. Despite the dire
predictions of national economic collapse
without immediate education reform, our
national productivity has soared since
those predictions were made. What, then,
are we to make of A Nation at Risk 20
years on?
The report's stentorian Cold War rhetoric
still commands attention: "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" (pg.
5).
By contrast, the report's recommendations
were banal. They called for nothing new,
only for more of the same: more science,
more mathematics, more computer
science, more foreign language, more
homework, more rigorous courses, more
time-on-task, more hours in the school
day, more days in the school year, more
training for teachers, more money for
teachers. And even those mundane
recommendations were based on a
veritable treasury of slanted, spun, and
distorted statistics.
Stop worrying so much about the Red Menace, the booklet said. The threat
was not that
our enemies would bomb us off the planet, but that our friends—especially
Germany,
Japan, and South Korea—would outsmart us and wrest control of the world
economy.
The commission members tightly yoked the nation's global competitiveness
to how well our
13-year- olds bubbled in test answer sheets. The theory was, to be kind,
without merit.
Nevertheless, it became very popular in the late 1980s, when the nation
slid into the
recession that would cost George H. W. Bush a second term. One then heard
many
variations of "lousy schools are producing a lousy work force and that's
killing us in the
global marketplace." The economy, however, was not listening to the litany
and came
roaring back.
During the years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, critics of
the schools not only
hyped the alleged bad news but also deliberately suppressed good news—or
ignored it
when they couldn't actually suppress it. The most egregious example was
the suppression
of the Sandia Report. Assembled in 1990 by engineers at Sandia National
Laboratories in
Albuquerque, the report presented 78 pages of graphs and tables and 78
pages of text to
explain them. It concluded that, while there were many problems in public
education, there
was no systemwide crisis.
Secretary of Energy James Watkins, who had asked for the report, called
it "dead wrong"
in the Albuquerque Journal. Briefed by the Sandia engineers who compiled
it, Deputy
Secretary of Education and former Xerox CEO David Kearns told them, "You
bury this or
I'll bury you." The engineers were forbidden to leave New Mexico to discuss
the report.
Officially, according to Diane Ravitch, then assistant secretary of education,
the report was
undergoing "peer review" by other agencies (an unprecedented occurrence)
and was not
ready for publication.
Lee Bray, the vice president of Sandia, supervised the engineers who produced
the report.
I asked Bray, now retired, about the fate of the report. He affirmed that
it was definitely
and deliberately suppressed.
There were other instances of accentuating the negative in the wake of
A Nation at Risk.
In February 1992, a small international comparison in mathematics and science
appeared.
America's ranks were largely, but not entirely, low, although actual scores
were near the
international averages. Critics would hammer the schools with this international
study for
years.
Five months after the math/science study, another international comparison
appeared, this
one in reading. No one knew. American 9-year-olds were second in the world
in reading
among the 27 nations tested. American 14-year-olds were eighth out of 31
countries, but
only Finland had a significantly higher score.
While A Nation at Risk offered a litany of spun statistics about the risks
the nation faced,
its authors and fellow believers presented no actual data to support the
contention that high
test scores implied competitiveness—only the most circumstantial of evidence.
The
arguments heard around the country typically went like this: "Asian nations
have high test
scores. Asian nations, especially Japan, have experienced economic miracles.
Therefore,
the high test scores produced the economic good times." Thus the National
Commission on
Excellence in Education—and many school critics as well—made a mistake
that no
educated person should: they confused correlation with causation.
The "data" on education and competitiveness consisted largely of testimonials
from
Americans who had visited Japanese schools. I once asked Paul George of
the University
of Florida about the difficulty of gaining entrance to any less-than-stellar
Japanese schools.
George has spent years in Japanese schools of various kinds. His reply
was succinct:
"Look, there are 27 high schools in Osaka, ranked 1 to 27. You can easily
get into the top
few. You would have a much harder time getting into number 12 or number
13. Not even
Japanese researchers can get into number 27."
The proponents of the test-score theory of economic health grew quiet after
the Japanese
discovered that the emperor's palace and grounds were actually not worth
more than the
entire state of California. Japan has foundered economically now for 12
years. The
government admits that bad loans from banks to corporations amount to more
than 10% of
its Gross Domestic Product. Some estimate the size of the bad loans as
high as 75% of
GDP.
The case of Japan presents a counterexample to the idea that high test
scores ensure a
thriving economy. But there is a more general method available to test
the hypothesis put
forth in A Nation at Risk. I located 35 nations that were ranked in the
Third International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) eighth-grade tests and were also
ranked for
global competitiveness by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Geneva think
tank.
Among these 35, the US was number one in competitiveness in 2001. Among
all 75
countries that the WEF ranked in its 2001-2002 report, the US was number
two, trailing
Finland. The rank order correlation coefficient between test scores and
competitiveness
was +.19, virtually zero. If five countries that scored low on both variables
were removed
from the list, the coefficient actually became negative.
A Nation at Risk fabricated its case for the connection between education
and
competitiveness out of whole cloth, but to make its case for the dire state
of American
education, it did provide a lot of statistics. Consider these:
1. "There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds
as
measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973, and 1977" (pg.
9). Maybe,
maybe not. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was not
originally
designed to produce trends, and the scores for 1969 and 1973 are backward
extrapolations from the 1977 assessment. In any case, the declines were
smaller for 9- and
13-year-olds and had already been wiped out by gains on the 1982 assessment.
Scores for
reading and math for all three ages assessed by NAEP were stable or inching
upward. The
commissioners thus had nine trendlines (three ages times three subjects),
only one of which
could be used to support crisis rhetoric. That was the only one they reported.
2. "The College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Tests demonstrate a virtually
unbroken decline
from 1963 to 1980" (pg. 8-9). This was true. But the College Board's own
investigative
panel described a complex trend to which many variables contributed. It
ascribed most of
the decline to changes in who was taking the test—more minorities, more
women, more
students with mediocre high school records, more students from low-income
families. All of
those demographic changes are associated with lower scores on any test.
It would have
been very suspicious if the scores had not declined.
3. "Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests
is now lower
than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched" (pg. 8). But in order to examine
trends in
test scores over time, one needs a test that is referenced to a fixed standard
where each
new form is equated to the earlier form. At the time, most companies that
produced
standardized tests did not equate them from form to form over time. Instead,
they used a
"floating norm." Whenever they renormed their tests, whatever raw score
corresponded to
the 50th percentile became the new norm. Only the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills
(ITBS,
grades 3-8) and the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED, grades
9-12) were
referenced to a fixed standard and equated from form to form, beginning
in 1955.
It is instructive to examine what the nation was experiencing during the
10 years of falling
test scores from 1965 to 1975. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed,
and 1965
opened with the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The decade also brought us
the Black
Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Students for a Democratic Society,
the Free
Speech Movement, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, Altamont, Ken Kesey and
his
LSD-laced band of Merry Pranksters, the Kent State atrocities, and the
1968 Chicago
Police Riot. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X were
all
assassinated. The nation became obsessed with and depressed by first the
war in Vietnam
and then Watergate. "Recreational drugs"—pot, acid, speed, Quaaludes, amyl
nitrate—had
become popular. If you remember the Sixties, the saying goes, you weren't
there.
Under these conditions of social upheaval, centered in the schools and
universities, it would
have been a miracle if test scores had not fallen.
Alas, we must recognize that good news about public schools serves no one's
reform
agenda—even if it does make teachers, students, parents, and administrators
feel a little
better. Conservatives want vouchers and tuition tax credits; liberals want
more resources
for schools; free marketers want to privatize the schools and make money;
fundamentalists
want to teach religion and not worry about the First Amendment; Catholic
schools want to
stanch their student hemorrhage; and home schooling advocates want just
that. All groups
believe that they will improve their chances of getting what they want
if they pummel the
publics.
It has been 20 years since A Nation at Risk appeared. It was false then
and is false now.
Today, the laments are old and tired. "Test Scores Lag as School Spending
Soars"
trumpeted the headline of a 2002 press release from the American Legislative
Exchange
Council. Ho hum. The various special interest groups in education need
another treatise to
rally round. And now they have one. It's called No Child Left Behind. It's
a weapon of
mass destruction, and the target is the public school system. Today, our
public schools are
truly at risk.
Gerald W. Bracey is an associate for the High/Scope Foundation in Ypsilanti,
Michigan, and an associate professor at George Mason University. His most
recent
book is What You Need to Know About the War Against America's Public Schools
(Allyn and Bacon/Longman, 2003). The above was adapted from an article
in the
April 2003 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. Reprinted with permission.
©1995 - 2003, AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
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