A Nation at Risk Anniversary Reflections
 
From April 1993: Articles by former U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell and
member of the National Commission on Excellence in Education Emeral A. Crosby
 
From April 2003: This article by Gerald W. Bracey
 
Also the full Nation at Risk report

April Foolishness: The 20th Anniversary of A Nation at Risk
(Originally published in April 2003)

By Gerald W. Bracey, Kappan Research columnist

TWENTY YEARS ago this month, James Baker, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, and Mike Deaver, Reagan's close advisor, defeated Attorney General Ed Meese in a battle of White House insiders. Over Meese's strong objections, they persuaded President Reagan to accept A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell had convened the commission. In his memoir, The Thirteenth Man, Bell recalled that he had sought a "Sputnik-type occurrence" that would dramatize all the "constant complaints about education and its effectiveness" that he kept hearing. Unable to produce such an event, Bell settled for a booklet with 36 pages of text and 29 pages of appendices about who had testified before the commission or who had presented it with a paper.

Meese and his fellow conservatives hated A Nation at Risk because it did not address any of the items on President Reagan's education agenda: vouchers, tuition tax credits, restoring school prayer, and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Baker called those issues "extraneous and irrelevant." He and the moderates on the White House staff thought the report contained a lot of good stuff to campaign on.1

The President accepted the report, but his speech acknowledging it largely ignored the report's content and simply reiterated his own agenda. According to Bell, the speech was virtually identical to the draft of a Reagan speech that he had read and rejected the previous day. The Washington Post called it a "homily." Bell tells of looking around as Reagan spoke and noticing that "Ed Meese was standing there with a big smile on his face."2

Despite Meese's sabotage, A Nation at Risk played big in the media. In the month following its publication, the Washington Post carried 28 stories about it. Few were critical. Joseph Kraft did excoriate conservatives for using the report to beat up on liberals without offering anything constructive. William Buckley chided it for recommendations that "you and I would come up with over the phone." The New York Times humor columnist Russell Baker contended that a sentence containing a phrase like "a rising tide of mediocrity" wouldn't be worth "more than a C in tenth-grade English." About the authors' writing overall, Baker said, "I'm giving them an A+ in mediocrity."3

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 commanded and 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" (p. 5).

By contrast, the report's recommendations were, as Buckley and others observed, 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. Hardly the stuff of revolution. And even those mundane recommendations were based on a set of allegations of national risk that Peter Applebome of the New York Times later called "brilliant propaganda."4 Indeed, the report was a veritable treasury of slanted, spun, and distorted statistics.

Before actually listing the indicators of risk, A Nation at Risk told America why those indicators meant that we were in such danger. 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: "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 educational system" (p. 7).

In penning this sentence, the members of the National Commission 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. A few, such as the historian Lawrence Cremin, saw these claims for the nonsense that they were. In Popular Education and Its Discontents, Cremin wrote:

American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education.5

Alas, Cremin's wisdom was read only by educators -- and not by very many of them, either. It certainly did not reach the policy makers who needed to absorb its message.

In fact, the theory propounded by A Nation at Risk 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. By late 1993 and early 1994, headlines over stories about the economy expressed energy and confidence: "The American Economy: Back On Top" (New York Times), "America Cranks It Up" (U.S. News & World Report), and "Rising Sun Meets Rising Sam" (Washington Post).

Of course, it was possible that the comeback of the U.S. economy had actually been spurred by true and large improvements in the schools. It was at least as possible as that school improvements after Sputnik in 1957 had put a man on the moon in 1969. If it was true, though, it was a national secret. In fact, the school critics denied that there had been any gains. Three months after the New York Times declared the American economy to be number one in the world again, Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM, took to that paper's op-ed page to declare "Our Schools Are Failing."6 One reads Gerstner's essay in vain for any hint that schools are on the way up.

Indeed, evidence abounds that Gerstner and other school critics, especially those in the first Bush Administration, strove mightily to keep the dire warning issued by A Nation at Risk alive, and they continue to strive today. In 2001 Gerstner was back in both the Washington Post and the New York Times. The CEOs of Intel, Texas Instruments, and State Farm Insurance all penned op-ed essays for national newspapers about the poor quality of schools, as did Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, former Sen. John Glenn, former Gov. Pete DuPont of Delaware, and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

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 of suppression -- that we know about -- 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.7

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.8

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.9 America's ranks were largely, but not entirely, low, although actual scores were near the international averages. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and Assistant Secretary Ravitch held a press conference that garnered wide coverage in both print and electronic media. "An 'F' in World Competition," was Newsweek's headline. Newsweek had fallen for the hokum that high test scores mean international competitiveness. The Washington Post quoted Alexander as saying that the study's outcome was a "clear warning that even good schools are not properly preparing students for world competition."10

Critics would hammer the schools with this international study for years. In January 1996, for instance, a full-page ad in the New York Times showed the rankings of 14-year-olds in math. Out of 15 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th. "If this were a ranking in Olympic Hockey, we would be outraged," said the large-type ad. The immediate source of the ad was the Ad Council, but the sponsors were, in the order in which they were listed in the ad, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Governors' Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Alliance of Business.11 Clearly, with friends like these, public schools needed no enemies.

Five months after the math/science study, another international comparison appeared, this one in reading. No one knew. Education Week discovered the study first, but only two months after the results were published and then only by accident. Robert Rothman, an EW reporter at the time, received a copy from a friend in Europe. 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.

Education Week ran the story on its front page. USA Today played off the EW account with its own front-page piece. USA Today's article included a quote from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education Francie Alexander that reflected the Bush Administration's handling of such good news. She dismissed the study as irrelevant. (I was told by someone in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement that Ravitch handed the results to a group of researchers in the office and told the group to make the study disappear. The study was conducted by an educational organization based in The Hague, so, unlike the federally funded Sandia Report, it couldn't be suppressed. The group of researchers produced about six inches' worth of reports but couldn't make the results go away.)

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 ['Asian Tigers' we called them then], 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. On returning from Japan, educational researcher Herbert Walberg said that many features of the Japanese system should be adopted here. "I think it's portable. Gumption and willpower, that's the key."12 The believers overlooked cautionary tales such as Ken Schooland's Shogun's Ghosts: The Dark Side of Japanese Education or the unpretty picture of Japanese schools presented in the education chapters of Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power.

How representative were the Japanese schools that these American visitors saw? No one knows for sure, but doubtless they saw only the good side. 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, a bit of misinformation widely disseminated as fact in Japan in the Eighties. 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. We now see headlines such as "The Sinking Sun?" (New York Times) and "A Second Decade of Economic Woes?" (Washington Post).

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 that high scores equal competitiveness. For this test, 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 U.S. was number one in 2001. Among all 75 countries that the WEF ranked in its Global Competitiveness Report 2001-2002, the U.S. was number 2, trailing Finland. But Finland did not take part in the first round of TIMSS in 1995. 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. It was the spin on these numbers that led Peter Applebome to characterize the report as propaganda. Consider these.

• "Over half the population of gifted students do not match their tested ability with comparable achievement in school" (p. 8). I have asked both commissioners and members of the commission staff to tell me where this statistic came from. No one knows. And, of course, it makes no sense because 20 years ago, the principal instruments for identifying gifted students were achievement tests.
  
• "Average tested achievement of students graduating from college is also lower" (p. 9). Another nonexistent statistic.
  
• "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" (p. 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.
  
• "The College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Tests demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980" (pp. 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.
  
  When the standards for the SAT were set, the students who received 500 as an average score were members of an elite: 10,654 high-schoolers, mostly living in New England. Ninety-eight percent were white, 61% were male, and 41% had attended private, college-preparatory high schools. In 1982, the year A Nation at Risk's commissioners labored, 988,270 seniors took the SAT. Eighty-four percent were white, 52% were female, 44% had mothers with a high school diploma or less, 27% came from families with incomes under $18,000 annually, and 81% attended public schools. 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.
  
• "Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched" (p. 8). The commissioners could not have known if this were true for "most standardized tests." 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. 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. Among achievement tests, only the ITBS-ITED battery met this requirement.

It was true that on the ITED, scores were lower than when Sputnik was launched. Barely. The commissioners could have noted that the scores had risen for five consecutive years and that their statement about test scores and Sputnik didn't apply to most middle or elementary grades. The five-year rise had been preceded by a decade-long decline, which itself was preceded by a 10-year rise. Scores rose from 1955, a baseline year when the test was renormed and qualitatively changed as well, to about 1965. Scores then fell until about 1975, reversed, and climbed to record high levels by 1985 (something unnoticed or at least unmentioned by critics or the media).

It is instructive to examine what the nation was experiencing during the 10 years of falling test scores from 1965 to 1975. Just one year before the decline began, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, and 1965 opened with the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Urban violence then spread across the nation. 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.

Popular books included such anti-Establishment tracts as The Making of a Counter Culture, The Greening of America, and The Pursuit of Loneliness. Books critical of schools included Death at an Early Age, The Way It Spozed to Be, 36 Children, Free Schools, Deschooling Society, The Death of School, How Children Fail, The Student as Nigger, Teaching As a Subversive Activity, and, most influential, Charles Silberman's 1970 tome, Crisis in the Classroom.

Under these conditions of social upheaval, centered in the schools and universities, it would have been a miracle if test scores had not fallen.

When A Nation at Risk appeared, universities and education associations fell over themselves lauding it. The education associations said that they welcomed the attention after a decade of neglect. "We are pleased education is back on the American agenda," wrote Paul Salmon, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. They also said, later, that they didn't want to appear defensive by challenging the report. They also said, much later and in private, that they were certain that, with all these problems in education, money would surely follow. They were wrong.

As for the universities, well, a crisis in our schools always presents a great opportunity for educational researchers seeking to liberate money from foundations and governments. A Nation at Risk was to the research universities as September 11 was to the arms and security industries.

The National Commission on Excellence in Education commissioned more than 40 papers that laid out the crisis. Virtually all of them were written by academics. The report acknowledged only one that was written by someone actually working in a school, and it was not a commissioned work. Harvey Prokop, a teacher in San Diego, wrote a critique of a National Commission seminar in his town. He called it "Intelligence, Motivation, and the Quantity and Quality of Academic Work and Their Impacts on the Learning of Students."13

Alas, nothing else is new and, indeed, 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; home schooling advocates want just that; and various groups no doubt just want to be with "their own kind." All groups believe that they will improve their chances of getting what they want if they pummel the publics.

It has been 20 years, though, since A Nation at Risk appeared. It is clear that it was false then and is false now. Today, the laments are old and tired -- and still false. "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.

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This article appeared in the April 2003 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 84, No. 8.
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