![]() "The one important reader of the report had apparently not read it after all," Holton said. In fact, the newly printed blue-cover report never mentioned these pet passions of the president. But the sobering report received immediate publicity for an almost comically accidental reason.Īs commission member Gerald Holton recalls, Reagan thanked the commissioners at a White House ceremony for endorsing school prayer, vouchers, and the elimination of the Department of Education. ![]() The report noted that our economy and national security would crumble if something weren't done. When the report was released in April 1983, it claimed that American students were plummeting academically, that schools suffered from uneven standards, and that teachers were not prepared. Department of Education's National Commission on Excellence in Education, he hoped to link the country's economic woes to the state of our schools. In this anxious context, Bell put together an eighteen-member commission to report on the quality of education in America. And it wasn't our enemies driving our industries into the ground, but rather our allies, Japan and Germany. First, polls indicated that women still tilted toward the Democrats, who owned such close-to-home issues as housing, health, and education. This stand had won him strong support - among men.īut Reagan had a couple of political problems. It was 1983 the Cold War was in full flower, and Reagan had swept into office on a promise to confront the Soviets. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. 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. 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. No paraphrase can do justice to its tone, so here's a verbatim sample: "Our Nation is at risk. The heart of the document is an indictment that lambastes America for letting schools slip into precipitous decline but praises the nation's good heart, great potential, and mighty past. Yet when I finally looked it up, I found a thirty-page political document issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a group convened by Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, Terrell Bell. Naturally, I assumed this bible of school reform was a scientific research study full of charts and data that proved something. I became aware of this fact some years ago, when I started writing about education issues and found that every reform initiative I read about - standards, testing, whatever - referred me back to a seminal text entitled "A Nation at Risk." Well, it didn't "just happen." What we now call school reform isn't the product of a gradual consensus emerging among educators about how kids learn it's a political movement that grew out of one seed planted in 1983. ![]() Yet today, a movement that stretches back several decades has narrowed us down to a single set of take-'em-or-leave-'em initiatives. ![]() ![]() It is, or should be, a choice between this reform and that reform. In short, it's never really a choice between supporting or rejecting school reform. In the future, there will be still others. What you hear today are today's ideas for school reform. Actually, however, according to Hoover Lydell, special assistant to the interim superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, "there is no such thing as the status quo. ![]()
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