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A Nation at Risk Anniversary Reflections Reflections One Decade After A Nation at Risk After a stormy gestation period, A Nation at Risk had a difficult birth. When I first pondered the idea of establishing the National Commission on Excellence in Education, my intention was that President Reagan appoint the panel, call the commission together for its first meeting, and personally give the members their assignments. However, opposition at the White House led the President to reject my proposal on the ground that such an action would highlight the federal role in education at a time when the Administration was committed to abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and to dramatically reducing federal involvement in and financial support of education. It soon became apparent to me that, if a nationwide study of the condition of education were to become a reality, the commission that carried out that study would have to be a Cabinet-level creation. In those days, I felt that my main mission on behalf of American education was damage control, and I believed that a major study of the condition of education would focus public attention on our schools and colleges and make it difficult politically to eliminate or significantly diminish the federal role. Therefore, in August 1981 I established the commission, appointed a chairman, and persuaded 17 others to serve. The membership was selected to be broadly representative of American education and of the geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity of the country. David Gardner president of the University of California, served as chair. We selected a talented group of people to participate, including a Nobel Prize winner, two university presidents (in addition to Gardner), a distinguished corporate executive, two local school board presidents (including the president of the National School Boards Association), and a variety of other prominent educators. The commission was asked to complete a nationwide study of the quality of American education and to publish a report within 18 months. That report, released at the White House on 26 April 1983, was A Nation at Risk. The President, a large group of education leaders, and members of the press received the report, and the rest is history. A Nation at Risk was front-page news in virtually every daily newspaper across the country and was a feature story on all the network television news shows. My hopes of getting a more prominent position for education on the national agenda were far exceeded by the reality. The commission's findings were much more negative than I had anticipated. When I first read the report, I was surprised to find such now-familiar rhetoric as "a rising tide of mediocrity" and "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." But such strong language had an electrifying effect on the American people. Commission members assured me that they wanted to produce a report that would rally the nation around their schools, and they certainly succeeded in doing that. In accordance with a promise I had made to the commission members -- to keep the report from gathering dust on a shelf -- we held 12 regional dissemination conferences on the content of the report. The President participated in several of these conferences, and he was the featured speaker at the final, nationwide event in Indianapolis that involved hundreds of prominent educational leaders, governors, and legislative officials. Following the release of the report and this series of conferences, I heard no more about abolishing the Department of Education. Even David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a subsequent Cabinet meeting called to plan federal spending cuts that the "sensitive area of education" should be exempted from the budget cutting. But this moratorium on onslaughts against education lasted only until after the 1984 election, at which point my budget was called back for added cuts prior to its submission to the January 1985 session of Congress. The states responded to A Nation at Risk with a flurry of legislative action establishing mandates, "accountability" directives, and various other changes in education policies. Many states created their own commissions to study their education systems and recommend reform measures. (Incidentally, Ross Perot was appointed by then-Gov. Mark White of Texas to head a major study in that state.) Several governors were particularly effective in leading the school reform movement. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Thomas Kean of New Jersey, Robert Graham of Florida, and Richard Riley of South Carolina were some of the most effective leaders on the state level. Foremost among these, in my view, was Gov. Riley (now President Clinton's secretary of education), who put his political future on the line, battled his state legislature when his proposals lost the first time around, and finally enacted an increase in the sales tax to fund a major school reform package. Contrary to popular belief, both Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and Mary Futrell of the National Education Association were supportive of the early initiatives. Teachers in these organizations were being blamed for difficulties not of their making, and their leaders merely stated this fact. No school, no matter how effective, can fully compensate for failure in the home, and there had been a steep decline in the nurturance and motivation provided by some students' homes. This decline continued unabated after A Nation at Risk was published. The cataclysmic change in the quality of students' lives outside of school and the steady erosion of parental support and community interest in education made it almost impossible for schools to succeed. In the face of these conditions, teachers were making heroic efforts. The intent of A Nation at Risk was to call the attention of the American people to the need to rally around their schools. No one intended for teachers to receive the blame that was heaped upon them. To be sure, in the years prior to A Nation at Risk we had reduced standards and lowered expectations in our schools. But these were changes in policy on the local and state levels, and few teachers had been involved or even consulted. For example, at the time of this nationwide study, 35 states required only a single year of mathematics and a single year of science for high school graduation. Textbooks were "dumbed down" in content and vocabulary, and, in response to continued lack of interest in education, educators had not worked hard enough to get parents committed to the education of their children. We silently suffered this loss of support without fighting back, and I believe that even today we are continuing to make this same mistake. At an informed discussion held at Vice President Bush's residence in Kennebunkport, Maine (the National Governors' Association conference was held in nearby Portland that year), I kept a promise I had made to several leading governors to let each state know where it stood in education as compared to the others. In August 1983 I initiated the practice of publishing a ranking of the states on more than 30 different measures of educational accomplishment and support. This was not a simple task, for the available data had serious limitations. The sole common indicator that I could find that would yield nationwide data on academic achievement was the system of college entrance examinations. Nationwide, college-bound seniors took either the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the entrance exam of the American College Testing Program. When I published a ranking of the states on these indicators, I included with every chart a cautionary statement on the limitations of these data. But the statement was largely ignored both by the press and by many educational leaders. The national pasttime of jumping to conclusions was just as avidly pursued in those days as it is today. In an effort to highlight the many outstanding schools in the country -- and as a way of countering the harsh criticism of education and educators -- I also initiated a program of identifying exemplary schools in all 50 states. We designed a flag to be flown on school flagpoles along with the U.S. flag. Criteria were adopted, nomination procedures to be followed by the state education agencies were promulgated, and a national selection panel of distinguished educators was appointed. Working with the state education agencies, this selection panel identified and honored several outstanding schools each year. The annual publication of a ranking of the states (dubbed "Bell's Wall Chart" by some local leaders) was continued by my first two successors, William Bennett and Lauro Cavazos, but Lamar Alexander abandoned the practice when he was lobbied heavily by critics of the program. The program giving national recognition to exemplary schools has continued. The top-down initiatives by the states failed to come anywhere near to meeting the expectations of those who sponsored the legislation. And we soon learned that gains in student achievement, declines in high school dropout rates, and other desired outcomes cannot be attained simply by changing standards and mandating procedures and practices. A much more massive, systemwide effort is required that engages parents, neighborhoods, and communities. We had placed too much confidence in school reforms that affected only six hours of a child's life and ignored the other 18 hours each weekday plus the hours on weekends and holidays. When George Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan, many educational leaders anticipated new initiatives from the new "Education President." The Bush Administration concluded that schools could be dramatically improved by redesigning how we organize for instruction. Caught in the typical conflict with extreme conservatives, who insist that there is no federal role in education and the less done the better, President Bush decided to focus on studying and redesigning our schools -- initiatives that could be undertaken without appropriating more money and with little controversy. The Bush Administration's efforts were based on the idea that the entire concept of schools as we traditionally think of them should be reexamined. Since the reform initiatives of the early and mid-Eighties had not worked, we should try to redesign the entire approach to teaching and learning. The designers were asked to consider all existing concepts and practices to be subject to challenge. Should we continue to assign teachers to teach students in traditional groups that we call "classes" in separate classrooms? Should we totally "restructure" what we teach and how we teach it? Are we ignoring the potential of technology in making learning at school more efficient? Should the school building itself be redesigned? If we were to start from scratch, would our plan for teaching and learning not be radically different from schools a we know them today? A nonprofit corporation, the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), was established. The next iteration of school reform initiatives was the President's education strategy, known as America 2000. The centerpiece of this strategy was the design of new models of schools and their installation in 535 sites across the nation. The lofty aim was to have these new schools up and running and being duplicated throughout the U.S. by the year 2000. The first step -- raising $250 million in contributions from corporate America -- fell short; only $50 million could be raised, despite the valiant efforts of many enthusiastic supporters. The original plan had been to find 25 to 30 design teams for these "break-the-mold" schools, but the number was subsequently reduced to 11. These design teams are now at work, and the education world is looking for their first reports to emerge on the scene any day. Those who have been keenly interested in education but have had the opportunity to look at schools only from the outside should not be blamed for this somewhat simplistic theory of redesign. It is easy for bystanders to decide that they can win in any endeavor, as long as they keep their spectator status and stay away from the dirt and grime of the playing field. It is only when one is engaged in all the details of any operation that it is possible to understand the practical problems and to anticipate the difficulties. Because they were viewing the situation from the outside, well-meaning and highly intelligent leaders in both politics and business concluded that they could fix the schools. Through the years we have had many pilot projects and so-called lighthouse schools. Even in those rare situations in which an experimental school has been unquestionably successful, the elements of that success have not been duplicated or emulated in nearby schools -- let alone spread throughout the nation. Where education reform is concerned, the oft-repeated slogan that there is nothing so contagious as a good example is simply not true. Schools resist change, and this fact must be taken into account by those who would reform them. Even if we have exciting new school designs, demonstrably superior to our traditional schools, and even if they are successfully implemented in 535 demonstration sites located in each congressional district across the nation, it is unlikely that the new structures and redesigned programs will spread to the 110,000 schools in the 15,000 school districts now operating under the laws of 50 different states. The judicial branch also entered the school reform frenzy. In response to litigation filed to compel legislatures to provide more equal funding for school districts with low taxable wealth, several state supreme courts have gone beyond the equalization of funding to the mandating of reforms. Texas and New Jersey lawmakers have been under court orders to meet certain criteria, and the supreme court in Kentucky, noting the low achievement of many Kentucky students, mandated sweeping reforms that, in addition to equalizing funding, apply standards and mandate results. Another school reform initiative has focused on the decision-making authority of school principals, teachers, and parents as opposed to district-level administrators. Many critics of the traditional structure of school administration have launched initiatives to limit the control of school district staffs and grant more autonomy to principals, teachers, and parents. The Illinois legislature, in an effort to remedy problems that legislators perceived to be obstacles to school improvement in Chicago, passed legislation creating powerful school-site governing bodies, elected by the people within the attendance areas of Chicago schools. Vested with powers from the legislature, these Chicago school-site councils are showing mixed results. It is still too early to know the outcome of this very unusual action to curtail by law central control over Chicago schools, but the initial success at some schools has been quite promising, and the action of the Illinois legislature may prove to be a prototype for other school systems in Illinois and elsewhere. Flatter organizational structures, more decision-making power at the school site, and less control from the central bureaucracy are all products of the school reform movement. These changes in decision-making authority have been sweeping the nation. I do not know of a major school system in the country that does not have initiatives under way to strengthen site-based management of schools. Another by-product of A Nation at Risk has been unprecedented Presidential attention to education. George Bush proclaimed himself to be the "Education President" during his successful 1988 campaign. President Bill Clinton brought the less-than-spectacular Bush record in education to the attention of the voters during the campaign of 1992 and promised to be a more effective "Education President." This has never happened before in the nation's history. Education is now a major, high-priority national concern, as well as a state and local responsibility. Gubernatorial attention to education has also flourished since A Nation at Risk. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, candidates campaigning for governor have highlighted education and touted their plans to give their states better schools. It is fashionable for governors to come forth with proposals for school reform in their annual messages to state legislatures. Contrary to my fears of a few years ago, this gubernatorial interest in education has not waned. Indeed, as I have followed school reforms in the various states since 1983, I have learned that, in almost every state in which significant progress has occurred, the prime leader has been the governor. Corporate America has joined the executive and legislative branches of our national and state governments in recognizing at long last that human intelligence and creativity in the workplace are essential to a strong and productive economy and that these qualities are nurtured in our schools. American corporations' ability to compete in a global marketplace is tied to the quality of talent produced by the schools. As we welcome this relatively recent concern for schools, we educators cannot help but wonder why education has had to suffer so many decades of benign neglect. I entered the profession in the 1946-47 school year, and it has taken all those intervening years to see education listed among the top issues on the national agenda. It would be unfair to conclude that we have totally failed to make our schools more efficient and effective in the difficult decade between 1983 and 1993. In the face of many negative influences on our children that come from outside the school, we have done well to maintain our high school completion rate and our level of performance on achievement measures. Today, however, school leaders and others must turn increasingly to the parents, homes, and communities. We have foolishly concluded that any problems with the levels of academic achievement have been caused by faulty schools staffed by inept teachers -- and that by fixing the schools we can attain the levels of success we so desperately need in this decade. Certainly, there is much that needs to be done within schools, for they must become dramatically better in the coming decades than they have ever been. But education must become everyone's responsibility, and we must transform the total culture so that it nurtures learning inside and outside the school. We must become a learning society. What lies ahead for the school reform movement? My deepest fear has always been that the nationwide interest in reforming and renewing our schools would fade away when the initial "quick fixes" of the 1980s failed. The best news of all is that we are relentlessly pursuing the quest for more effective education and that our efforts will extend through the Clinton years and beyond. The new President, a crop of young and energetic governors, and a new generation of lawmakers in Washington all bode well for the future of education. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is now before Congress for reauthorization, and most of the state legislatures are continuing to wrestle with school-related issues in their new sessions. There is much to do and more excitement about doing it than I have seen in a long time. Life will certainly not be easy for school leaders in the years ahead. But we have learned much from the past decade, and I am confident that we will not repeat our mistakes. My somewhat cloudy crystal ball, dimmed by many years in academe, still grants a few glimpses of what I perceive to be the imperatives for school reform for the rest of the 1990s. For what it's worth, here is a list of eight areas that we will have to address if our goals are to be realized. 1. Technology. The microchip will have a profound impact on teaching and learning. We haven't even scratched the surface of the potential for today's amazing technological tools to carry more of the burden of presenting subject matter to learners, of communicating more effectively with parents, of individualizing instruction for each student, and of completing the horrendous load of paperwork that goes with schooling. Unfortunately, most schools using technology for instruction have isolated computers from teachers and placed them in computer labs, where they will be the least intrusive and disturbing to teachers. Many bright and creative teachers are itching to have computers in their classrooms. Computers must come out of the labs and into the classrooms, where they can serve as slave mechanisms for the next generation of bright and creative teachers. Even supermarket checkers have more high-tech support than today's teachers. It's time for the technological revolution that has been sweeping the land to reach our classrooms. We have a great many teachers ready for the transformation. When will taxpayers and policy makers have the vision to provide the names? 2. Staffing. The tired and worn-out school staffing and teacher personnel practices of past decades must be scrapped. The single salary schedule cries out for enhancements that will compensate our great teachers on a level commensurate with their worth. This problem keeps coming up on the school reform agenda. It won't go away, because our current practices hamstring our efforts to build a truly great teaching profession. We would do well to tear a page out of the higher education book. In higher education there are teaching assistants, a variety of academic ranks, distinguished professorships, and endowed chairs. Slowly but surely, some adaptations of and variations on these practices are coming to the public schools. The worn and weary personnel patterns will begin to disappear soon -- and the sooner, the better. 3. A larger national role. The idea hatcheries in and around the nation's capital have done much to advance the cause of national standards and national assessment in recent years. Even a national education trust fund (perhaps from an earmarked source of federal revenue such as that enjoyed by the state highway departments) might emerge in the next few years. The state highway departments join the federal government in setting national standards for a system of freeways, and we will soon see a similar pattern for education. Just as the money from the federal highway trust fund flows to the states (as long as they meet minimum standards), a similar federal program to drive a nationwide school improvement program is likely to appear on the scene. It may emerge from the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act now before Congress, or it may appear later in the decade. But we will see a "driving mechanism" to reward and motivate the attainment of higher national standards in education. There must be incentives to drive school improvement, and the idea of a national education trust fund keeps coming up for discussion. In the years ahead, we will have less testing but more effective assessment, and this will be tied to the national standards. Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the brightest minds in education, is already sniffing these ideas like the leading educational bloodhound that he is. 4. Private schools. Whether those of us who have been public school leaders like it or not, the private schools will become more prominent and will flourish in the years ahead. Some states (such as Michigan and Minnesota) are using state funds to provide incentives to private schools. Chris Whittle's Edison Project plans to launch at least 1,000 private schools, based on the work of a special design team, within this decade. Some very bright and creative people are currently working on the Edison Project, and I would not be surprised if their efforts yield more promising ideas than those coming out of NASDC. But our public schools will continue to compete with the private schools. Out of this competition, we may find a mix of public and private schools that will be similar to the situation in higher education, where great public universities exist alongside great independent universities -- all contributing to the public good. 5. Parent involvement. In school reform initiatives of the future, we must pay more attention to that other educational institution: the home. We must learn more about how to motivate parents, workers in child-care centers, and others to make after-school hours and weekends more educationally productive. We will soon have a greater number of formal programs of parent involvement. We need to begin a tradition of parents and schools working together to establish individualized education plans for every student, as is now required by federal law only for handicapped children. Our country's most famous math teacher, Jaime Escalante, has been wise enough to require parental support for all students in his math classes as a condition for admission. A pledge of support should be required -- either by local school board rules or by state law -- of the parents of all children before they enroll in any school. We have not worked hard enough on the dual problems of declining parental support and of parents' unwillingness to take responsibility for the education of their own children. Without parents' full support, we will never succeed in our aspirations. Gaining the support of parents will happen only if the education of their children becomes a high priority for them. At long last, we are beginning to realize this fact. Past school reform efforts have fallen short of expectations partly because educators have assumed that schools could do the job alone. We will not repeat that mistake. 6. Size. Both schools and districts are much larger than they once were. This issue is beginning to attract more attention, as we study the circumstances in which school failure is the most pronounced. The simple fact is that very large schools and very large districts have a difficult time responding quickly and flexibly to problems that are associated with student failure. Seldom do we see a huge secondary school that is a distinguished institution. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare. Enormous school systems struggle with the sheer weight of numbers in their attempts to foster parent and community ownership of their schools. We must break the huge inner-city school systems into smaller units, and the massive secondary schools must be downsized. The relationship of size to efficiency and to the ability to attract parental and community support has been ignored during the decade since A Nation at Risk was published. But the message is now coming through clearly. It is futile for us to continue to complain about the ineffectiveness of our huge inner-city schools while we fail to counter the problems caused simply by vast size. The Chicago experiment may be an answer. But we must act aggressively, and state legislatures have the primary responsibility. 7. Leadership. Leadership, especially at the school level, has begun to attract more attention as a key ingredient in any successful school reform. In the next decade school improvement initiatives will require increasingly more sophisticated and insightful principals and superintendents. In the next four to five years, teachers will also be central as leaders and as pioneers in school improvement and innovation. Studies of our most successful school principals are beginning to yield practical information that can be applied to the training and recruitment of outstanding school leaders. Parents and business officials alike are becoming impatient with the mediocre performance of some of our school leaders. As public pressure continues to mount, there will be massive turnover in the ranks of school principals and superintendents. After 10 years of trying to make our schools more effective, we are learning at last that we must begin with bright, dynamic, and persuasive school leaders. It is futile to even begin to try to improve a school if the leadership is lackluster. We also know that teacher leadership of and involvement in school improvement must become a more integral part of our plans. 8. Brain research. During the remaining years of this decade, we will continue to learn more about the human brain and how it functions. This new knowledge will work hand in glove with the amazing march of technological progress to make teaching and learning more productive. We have recently learned, for example, that we are missing a great opportunity to intervene to help children develop their intellectual powers during the earliest of years of life, when the brain grows at a fantastic rate. While the human body requires about 18 years to attain most of its size and weight, the human brain attains much of its physical size during the first five years of life. During these early years, children must live an intellectually active life, and their minds must be constantly stimulated by learning new vocabulary, math concepts, colors, geometric shapes, and so on. Parents and child-care workers must learn to become "incidental teachers," so that they can seize the precious teaching moments to help preschoolers develop their mental powers. Such incidental teaching is not formal; it happens at the breakfast table, in the supermarket shopping cart, in the car, and in the bedroom while getting ready for bed, and at many other times and in many other places. It is a way of living with and relating to preschoolers that enriches their learning opportunities and develops their minds. Schools must reach out to parents and child-care workers to help them become skilled in incidental teaching. Early learning in homes and in child-care centers will be crucial to school reform initiatives in the future. The evidence of the effectiveness of incidental teaching is growing, and the advantages should become part of every child's educational heritage. The 10 years since the publication of A Nation at Risk have been a splendid misery for American education. We have learned much. We have suffered many disappointments. But we have not given up the quest to shape education into the super-efficient enterprise that it must become if America is to keep its proud place of leadership in the marvelous Information Age of this decade and beyond. Perhaps we should have made much more progress than we have. But at least we have stayed with the task. • Search for more Kappan articles in the Publication Archives • Join or start a discussion about this article in the PDK Forum
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