“A Nation at Risk” was published in 1983. It launched the false narrative that American public schools were failing. The nation was in recession, and the authors of the report blamed the schools. When the economy improved, no one said, “Oops, we were wrong about the schools.”
In this article, James Harvey and David Berliner reflect on what the report said, and what needs to change to create real reform.
Although there is powerful evidence of significant improvement in American schools since 1971, as Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education, recently noted, “A Nation at Risk” itself ignored that evidence in favor of launching what turned into a “shock and awe” campaign that promoted a consistent narrative of school failure.
Part of the shock and awe campaign used the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). With the encouragement of Secretary Bennett and his allies, this excellent assessment was diverted from its original purpose of measuring what students at various grade levels actually know to a new goal: judging what students at various grade levels should know.
Adding to the confusion, NAEP’s governing body, the National Assessment Governing Board, adopted three vague terms to define performance benchmarks: Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Almost nobody understands what these terms mean. Analysts, journalists, and state officials use the term “proficient” as the barometer of success despite the fact that the government has consistently maintained that what most people would consider to be proficient performance would not meet NAEP’s definition of proficiency.
So we are told every few years that only about a third of our students are “proficient” in reading or mathematics under NAEP’s benchmarks as though that were information of great value. Yet it is clear from recent research published by the National Superintendents Roundtable and the Horace Mann League (“How High the Bar?”) that the vast majority of students in most nations cannot clear the NAEP bar of “proficiency.”
Indeed, government officials acknowledge that to understand how many students in the United States are performing at grade level, the appropriate benchmark to examine is “basic,” not “proficient.“
What to Do?
Nobody should think for a minute that there aren’t very real problems with learning in America. There’s a lot to be done. But we’re not going to solve our school problems by exaggerating them or by misleading the public about school quality.
It is simply not true that American schools are failing 60 percent or more of their students, as NAEP’s proficient benchmark suggests. NAEP’s data indicate that nearly 70 percent of fourth graders are performing on grade level in reading, with 80 percent performing on grade level in mathematics. For 8th graders, the rates are 76 and 70 percent, respectively. While it would be gratifying to see higher numbers, these results are a much better guide to action than the deceptive picture of failure painted by the misleading term “proficient.”
“How High the Bar?” recommends that NAEP adopt benchmarks used by international education assessments, such as low, intermediate, high, and advanced. These terms provide a much more neutral and accurate take on student achievement.
It’s time also that we put an end to educational policy-making grounded in testing and tax cuts. As the recent wave of statewide protests across the nation indicates, educators are tired of standing by, their dignity under assault while their incomes stagnate and books and buildings fall apart.
Of course we should build more flexibility into the system, along with more variety and greater responsiveness to student and parent preferences.
Finally, we should go back to some of the advice the excellence commission received during its hearings but tossed aside in developing its report. Oddly, President George H.W. Bush adopted some of these ideas in his “America 2000” program. Make sure all infants have a decent start in life so that they’re “ready” when school begins. Worry about the 80 percent of their waking hours that students spend outside the school walls. Provide adequate health care for children and a living wage for working parents, along with affordable day-care.
We can’t afford these things? Nonsense! The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. It can certainly provide its citizens with the basics that other nations provide to theirs.
Thirty-five years later, this nation has itself saddled with an educational-industrial complex with corporations and investors in charge, being a burden to the system, and as a result this nation is at risk, with waves of protests by people “tired of standing by, their dignity under assault while their incomes stagnate and books and buildings fall apart.” Waves of protests, popular uprisings were not present in 1983. They are now. Get ready.
Great summary. Will become required reading in my Issues in American Education course.
I bought this line for 11-plus years until I was exposed to excellent public schools and teachers, which and who were far more prevalent than I had previously believed. That experience and understanding helps explain why, in the mid-1990s, I viewed an individual named Diane Ravitch with great skepticism. It took me a little less than 20 years to change my mind about her. 😉 Perhaps this explains why Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saul is one of my favorite paintings.
A Nation at Risk
A nation at risk,
But not from the school,
From law of the fist
And corporate rule
From spending on guns
Instead of on folks
The trillions in funds
For fear-driven hoax
When test score charts hang by the wall
And every teacher blows her nail
And Broad bears charters into the hall,
And I come frozen home in pail,
When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To whom;
Tu-whit, to-whom, to blame?
While walkout-ers doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And testing drowns the shop class saw,
And kids sit brooding in the snow,
And parent’s nose looks red and raw
When public schools hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To whom;
Tu-whit, to whom so lame?
While protester doth keel the pot.
Lovely poem
I heard the owl
Call your name
“The Left Coast Teacher’s
Not to blame!”
For testing score
And Common Core
And failing school
And Betsy’s rule
And “Who” asked owl
“Has sealed your fates?”
Coyote howl
Said “Billy Gates”
Thank you and thank you! (Walkout-er, singular that should have been in mine.) Your last one has an Old West feel, from my perspective.
The door was wide open, the night it was hot,
So SomeDAM Poet walked in and sat by Broad’s cot.
Billy Gates had gone for some data, his meat,
No hat on his head and no boots on his feet;
When he saw two poets on the porch in the gloom,
He pulled his checkbook and backed into the room.
Billy said, Who is that? and he spoke Eli’s name,
Then from SomeDAM Poet’s pen the answer it came —
The swift, biting ballad went true to its mark,
And Rephorm, it fell dead on the floor in the dark.
The principal at my school is forever complaining that we have, “so many 4.0 students, but not enough 3’s on our state test.” A 3 in our state test is equivalent to “proficient.” This principal is basically accussing the teachers of not doing enough to raise test scores. I have told him over and over that a 3 is actually above grade level, and that we should look at 2s and higher, as 2 is grade level. This article is definitely being given to this principal.
Ha. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the endless string of administrators, consultants, supervisors, coaches, facilitators and other testing personal forced into schools with an NCLB/R2T/ESSA “accountability” actually UNDERSTOOD every change so suddenly pushed onto teachers.
You’re asking way too much of those adminimals and their sycophants, ciedie.
Just imagine, FDR created Social Security in the depths of the Great Depression and LBJ enacted Medicare and Medicaid during the horrible turmoil of the Vietnam war era. And still we do not have universal health care in this country!? Decade after decade, tens of millions of Americans can’t afford health insurance or can only afford substandard garbage health insurance; they are just one illness away from being bankrupted or forced into penury.
“A Nation at Risk” was the battle call of the 1% to attack public institutions that serve working families. Public education is a prime target because it is a prime public asset. Public education is a multi-billion dollar potential shift in wealth from working people to the already wealthy class. The goal is to exploit working people to benefit the 1%. This attack will not stop with public education. The privateers are already trying to undermine community colleges, state colleges and the VA. They won’t stop there either. They will go after all the social safety nets so working people pay more to get less. The only hope for the middle class and poor is to show up and vote against these greedy oligarchs and privateers. After the Citizens United decision, Jimmy Carter said,”“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”https://www.salon.com/2016/12/25/no-middle-class-no-republic-gop-plans-to-destroy-americas-safety-net-will-also-kill-democracy_partner/
It might be dangerous and life-threatening for an industrious reporter to dig this deep, but I’m willing to bet that a deep investigation into Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” report would lead to David and Charles Koch and reveal that the report was part of their long-term goals to destroy the public sector and subvert the US Constitution. Charles Koch is the mastermind and he thinks LONG term.
The Koch brothers launched ALEC in 1974.
President Ray-Gun released the flawed and misleading “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983.
“The California Democratic State Committee released a 29 page report, Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator. A shorter version of the report was distributed as a campaign pamphlet. The thesis was that “Ronald Reagan is an extremist’s collaborator in California. He endorses their projects, promotes their policies, takes their money. He is their front man.’ Meanwhile, he pretends to be a moderate, middle-of-the-roader. The record belies him. It shows that he has collaborated directly with a score of top leaders of the super-secret John Birch Society.”
http://davekopel.org/Misc/OpEds/Ronald-Reagan-extremist-collaborator.html
How Charles Koch Backed the John Birch Society at the Height of Its Attacks on Martin Luther King
https://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13017/how-charles-koch-backed-john-birch-society-height-its-attacks-martin-luther-king
Like His Dad, Charles Koch Was a Bircher
http://progressive.org/dispatches/like-dad-charles-koch-bircher-new-documents/
Test scores and graduation rates are the drivers of too many discussions of education. In the hands of ultra-conservatives, they produce headlines like this from Walter E. Williams.
How Colleges Are Ripping Off a Generation of Ill-Prepared Students
Williams has no interest in looking at the definition of “proficiency” in NAEP scores for twelfth graders. He concludes, on the basis of those scores, that most high school diplomas are worthless. He adds fuel to the fire by quoting the high number of students who enter college so ill-prepared they must enroll in remedial coursework.
Begin quote
Earlier this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the nation’s “report card,” was released. It’s not a pretty story.
Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.
The atrocious National Assessment of Educational Progress performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.
For blacks, the news is worse. Roughly 75 percent of black students received high school diplomas attesting that they could read and compute at the 12th-grade level. However, 83 percent could not read at that level, and 93 percent could not do math at that level.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >> end quote.
The “Find out more” link brings you to an invitation to join the Heritage Foundation. Comments on Williams’ editorial opinion claimed that universities were indoctrinating students to liberal left communism and godlessness. Several comments focused on the economic value of jobs that do not require college compared to the cost of a college education. One commentator said that loans ought to be higher for people who choose to major in literature than a person who chooses a career path likely to produce a high income.
Although this link is to the Daily Signal, I read this editorial opinion by Walter Williams in USA Today. https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/04/25/educational-fraud-continues/
The devaluing of collegiate education is fueled by reports on test scores and the invention of “college and career” standards, as if these are written in stone. In addition to that, colleges began offering their own tests for entry-level courses which, if not passed, meant students had to enroll in remedial courses. Then disputes arouse about the number of students that required remedial coursework. Carol Burris, among others, showed how these were reports were cherry picked to argue for higher standards and so on.
Williams is a longstanding ultra-conservative commentator, and also a master of cherry-picking data.
Thanks for this. I am sure sorry I was not classified as proficient or basic when I was a child. My mind was filled with the opposite, how wonderful I was. It took me quite some time to realize that I was just another human being with an education, and, if I did not pursue it further, I would become a human being who neglected his education. It strikes me that it is more damaging to be told you cannot compete. How can I ever thank the heritage foundation enough?
While I was a teacher I spent a year in Belgium and visited schools there and in France, Germany, and Belgium (30 schools). Most of them did not favorably impress me. The teaching was mostly in the form of lecturing, some of it very dull.
While in Belgium three of my own children attended the local school taught in French. Only my youngest learned French that year. Our oldest son was in the equivalent of sixth grade and learned almost nothing that year. The teacher would not allow another student to explain anything to him.
When we came back to Belgium a year later, we met several boys who had been in our son’s class. Not one of them had passed the test that would allow them to go on to an academic high school. Some of them were able to get into a trade school, but the others were working at a job or doing nothing. Back in the U.S.our son was credited with the former year of school and put into high school, even though he had missed learning anything in Belgium.