This April marks forty years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.”
The commission, which worked for eighteen months, was created in August 1981 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell early in his tenure with President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Bell gives this rationale for the commission in his memoir. “We needed some means of rallying the American people around their schools and colleges [and] educators also needed to be shaken out of their complacency.”
He accomplished that goal.
Edward B. Fiske, education editor of the New York Times for seventeen years, describes the report as “thirty-five pages that shook the U.S. education world [becoming] one of the most significant documents in the history of American public education.”
Here are three report themes that launched what came to be called standards-based education reform. It focused on creating standards for student learning, testing students to see if they were meeting those standards, and holding students and teachers accountable for results.
First, the report’s audience was not the conventional one of education reports. Instead of directing the report to education experts and others in the profession—the producers of education—it was an “Open Letter to the American People.” The commission wanted to educate consumers—for example, taxpayers, parents, and employers—and mobilize them to act on the problem it documented. To do this, it used direct and dramatic language like “...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.”
Second, the commission identified one problem that K–12 education had to solve. The reason for this rising tide of mediocrity was that young people were not learning enough to live, work, and compete in the new economy, placing the nation’s security at risk. The commission’s vivid language and military analogy called on Americans to roll back that tide and end the threat: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.” The report documented the dimensions of the risk from the testimony it received, including thirteen examples. Improving education required raising education standards to improve students’ academic achievement or performance outcomes.
Third, the commission’s analysis led them to have a clear goal for schools. Again, the language of the report is direct: “...academic excellence [is] the primary goal of schooling [and it] seems to be fading across...American education.” Striving for excellence involves the individual learner, the school or college, and society acting together to ensure students “work to the limits of their capabilities.” The report argued that excellence and the equitable treatment of diverse people are not in conflict so one “cannot...yield to the other in principle or practice.”
These three themes—a focus on the consumers of education, education outcomes, and the notions of excellence and equity—became the hallmarks, for better or worse, of modern standards-based education reform. Many would come to refer to the modern education reform effort as the excellence movement.
The report did spur state policymakers to action. Beginning in 1985, the nation’s governors working in a bipartisan manner through the National Governors Association became the primary group working to advance this excellence agenda. This involved a multi-year commitment to monitor how the states were implementing seven reform policies, published under the title of Time for Results.
In retrospect, it may surprise today’s readers the commission did not discuss school choice or market-based education reforms in their report. While President Reagan ran on an education agenda that included school vouchers and tax credits that families could use for their children to attend private schools, federal legislation on these issues were not proposed until after his reelection.
This occurred when William J. Bennet, replacing Bell in 1985 as secretary of the Education Department, proposed an education reform agenda based on what he called the three C’s: content, character, and choice. It included legislative proposals for a K–12 school voucher program and tuition tax credits. Both failed to gain traction with Congress. But this effort established standards-based reform and some forms of market-based reform like public school choice (and later, charter schools) as the twin pillars of a bipartisan school reform agenda.
Tragically, this bipartisan political consensus has collapsed.
But “A Nation At Risk” today continues to challenge Americans to prepare young people to live, work, and compete in today’s economy by pursuing the twin goals of academic excellence and the equitable treatment of our diverse population.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Center Square.
