EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, April 1, 2003
Time:	3:00 PM -- 5:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

April 2003
A Nation at Risk: Twenty Years Later

Twenty years ago in April 1983, in its ominously titled A Nation at Risk, the National Commission on Excellence in Education delivered a devastating assessment of American education that helped shape two decades of reform. Warning that declining student achievement put the very foundations of American prosperity and security at risk, the commission called for ambitious reforms in curricula, graduation requirements, teacher quality, and homework.

This anniversary provides an opportune time to reexamine the recommendations of the commission, consider the lessons learned, and discuss the implications for current reform efforts. Has much changed since the report was issued? Have the intervening decades been a period of improvement or lost opportunity? Were the lessons of A Nation at Risk well-learned? At an April 1 AEI event, scholars discussed the impact of the landmark report and the future of education reform.

Michael Cohen
Achieve

I reread A Nation at Risk over the weekend and I was struck by how powerful it is, how powerful an indictment of the status quo it was, and how much of a call to arms it was. It reminded me that the Commission on Excellence in Education’s report was largely based on the well-founded assumption that a well-informed citizenry would be the best tool to promote education reform, an assumption that is still valid. A Nation at Risk got a number of things exactly right: the call for higher standards and expectations in a more focused and rigorous core curriculum for all students, the call for measurable performance benchmarks for high school graduation and college admission, and the proposal of a national set of standardized assessments. The report recognized that learning occurs as a result of student effort to master challenging material, and it made a strong case that students bear a degree of responsibility for learning. The call for new and effective incentives to attract and retain highly qualified teachers was also correct at the time and is still pertinent today.

Secondly, it recognized and counted on an informed and alarmed public to insist on reform and results. The report kicked off twenty years of sustained education reform efforts. In the aftermath of the report, states responded immediately by increasing graduation requirements, putting testing programs in place, lengthening the school day and year, adding homework requirements, and mandating teacher evaluations. In short, the states tightened their systems along the lines that the report advised. At the same time, states also significantly increased funding for education. In the 1980s, governors of both parties championed education reform and tax increases to pay for them and watched their poll numbers go up as they did that. Governors even pushed the agenda further; the "Time for Results Report" in the mid 1980s called for a horse trade of accountability for flexibility and really pushed us to focus on results rather than inputs. Over time, states placed greater emphasis on teachers and school leaders and the federal government went from being a sideline supporter of education to being a senior partner in the endeavor. This report launched an awful lot of activity that has taken on a momentum of its own.

That being said, it is pretty obvious that we still are a nation at risk. The achievement gains that we hoped for twenty years ago have not materialized. So you have to ask, how did a set of good recommendations that we have all acted on over twenty years lead to a set of results that have not put us where we want to be?

We have not witnessed the gains for three reasons. First, A Nation at Risk failed because we got the horse trade wrong. This notion of more accountability in exchange for flexibility assumed that our schools were populated with leaders and teachers who were filled with the knowledge, skills, and great ideas to do outstanding things. It assumed that if these individuals were only freed from the shackles of state regulations and curriculum requirements that schools would actually make significant gains. What we missed, or underestimated at the time, was the difficulty of building the capacity for individuals to actually deliver teaching and curriculum in powerful ways. We did not make a significant effort to provide schools with curriculum and instruction materials, diagnostic assessments, or the data and analytic tools to guide improvement efforts. We did not provide the sustained high-quality professional development that is necessary for teachers and school leaders, and we did not help schools develop the leadership, norms, and collegial structures to support continuous improvement. We did not do enough to figure out how to recruit, retain, and equitably allocate highly qualified teachers and principals to the schools that need them most.

The second phenomenon that kept us from realizing the gains we desired is our fragmented system of governance. On the part of the states, there is very little consistency in the standards that are set for educational progress, such as high school graduation. There is very little alignment between the demands of postsecondary education or the workforce and what state standards say about what students should know and be able to do. This outcome occurs when you have fifty states and 1600 districts and you say "go set standards. Everything will come out right." Also, the evolution of the federal government into a senior partner in education reform has created a lot of heated battles about the role of the government in education. Unfortunately, these arguments have created more heat than light and have made it more difficult to get the necessary work done at the state and local levels.

Our fragmented system actually helps us because it preserves the states as the laboratories of American democracy. It gives the states the room to design and implement reform programs in many different ways. Given our limited knowledge about how to do this right, the states play a very important role as a testing ground for new reform strategies.

Third, A Nation at Risk failed to produce the changes we need because, while the report was focused on improving the American high school, the large majority of the reform efforts of the last twenty years have focused on the elementary grades. The report spawned limited reforms to raise graduation and curriculum requirements in high schools, but otherwise the American high school has remained unchanged for the last twenty years. The reason for this is that they are the most difficult institutions in education if not our nation to change. The call for raised standards did not address the fragmentation of the curriculum, the tracking system, and the large class size that often works against the engagement of high school students. We must pay much more sustained attention to high school with a more powerful and radical set of reform strategies that will start from the assumption that the purpose of high school is to get all students up to a set of standards that will prepare them for postsecondary education or work. That is a very big agenda still ahead of us.

Lynne V. Cheney
AEI

Although A Nation at Risk was a powerful impetus to hundreds of education reports, at least as many education summits, and billions of dollars in reform projects, there has been very little to show in the way of results. Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress remain virtually the same on the trend exam as they were before A Nation at Risk was published. Among the nation’s twelfth graders today, only 8 percent can solve math problems that require more than two steps. In the Third International Math and Science Survey, American twelfth graders ranked nineteenth out of twenty-one nations.

Why are we performing so poorly? My theory is that that many of the reforms engendered by A Nation at Risk have not been reforms at all. Instead of bringing about changes, these so-called reforms have in fact maintained and strengthened the status quo. Instead of making matters better, they have actually made them worse by galvanizing a way of thinking that has prevailed in and failed our schools for a very long time.

In October 1999, Education Week featured a front-page story with the headline "Tests to Reflect New Teachers’ Subject Savvy." The Educational Testing Service, it said, was revising its exam for new teachers, the Praxis, to reflect the standards written by the nation’s subject matter associations. This sounded thrilling until I took a look at what the subject matter associations actually meant by subject matter. One would think that the National Council of Teachers of English would want literature teachers to know Shakespeare’s plays or Lincoln’s speeches. But in the view of the council, what teachers ought to master is a theory that devalues the knowledge they might have in those areas by defining education as a student-directed enterprise. Teachers, rather than being sages who make sure students know great literature and the ideas that animate it, are to act as guides or facilitators who allow students to discover and create their own knowledge. This philosophy is problematic when it comes to setting standards. How could any organization of adults say what it is that students should know and be able to do when the authority over this matter has been turned over to the students?

The math and history standards used to make the Praxis more content heavy were not much better. The standards put out by the National Council of Teachers of mathematics in 1989 are also based on the idea that children should create knowledge for themselves. These standards gave rise to an entire generation of textbooks in which teachers are referred to as "colearners" and students are encouraged to create their own methods of multiplication and division. If they fail to develop their own methods, not to worry, they can always rely on calculators, which the math council recommends beginning in kindergarten.

The third group charged with revising the Praxis was the National Council of Teachers of Social Studies. This group also views teachers as facilitators who, rather than teaching a subject matter they command, arrange for students to have experiences through which they can learn. Rather than saying that children should know who Frederick Douglass was or when the civil war occurred, the social studies standards declare that they should have, "experiences that provide for the study of the way human beings view themselves in and over time."

As it happens, the Praxis was already tilted in the direction of the subject matter associations before 1999, and the revision of the exam in 1999 by the same groups did not lead to a more rigorous and thoughtful exam. On the new Praxis, for example, if a question was about how to handle a student essay that contained misspelled words and bad grammar, the incorrect response is to tell the student which words were misspelled and how to correct the grammatical errors. This pattern is consistent throughout the test: phonetic decoding strategies is a wrong answer; direct instruction is a wrong answer; and the use of standardized tests is a wrong answer.

As the Koret Task Force has recently noted, one reason that A Nation at Risk has produced so little improvement is that the report underestimated the resistance to change of the organized interests of the K-12 education system. I would like to add as a corollary that A Nation at Risk also underestimated the ability of those interests to coopt reform, to divert the energies of parents and policymakers who want to change our schools, into efforts that in fact perpetuate the views and preferences that have long held American students back.

Chester E. Finn
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

We can practically stipulate that twenty years after A Nation at Risk, most of the trend lines are flat. We do not have a whole lot to show by way of improved results. As the Koret Task Force suggests, the Excellence Commission of 1983 did not get it quite right. It diagnosed the performance problem but it did not get the causes right and it was naïve in believing that the education system, if given good advice, would change its ways and produce better results. The 1983 report contained lots of good advice, but the authors did not understand that they were delivering it to a system full of deeply entrenched interests that did not want to change.

The excellence commission could not force anybody to change because it delivered its report and then went out of business. Well, guess who did not go out of business these past twenty years? All of the entrenched adult interest groups that were resistant to change. So the group advocating change folded its tent assuming that good advice would do the trick and went home to its respective campuses and homes, and the folks that were deeply associated with the status quo stuck around. In other words, A Nation at Risk did not change any of the basic power relationships in education.

Although very little force was applied from the outside early on, recently the standards-based reform effort, embodied by No Child Left Behind, and the competition and choice movements have applied some pressure on the system to change. Both approaches are based on the logic that by creating harsh consequences for schools that fail and generous rewards for those that succeed, schools will find it in their best interest to change. We have choice and standards-based reforms operating side-by-side at the moment, and I do not regard them as alternatives at all. I believe that, going forward, hope lies in the intersection of these two ideas, if indeed hope lies anywhere.

The Koret Task Force offers three recommendations for the future course of reform that focus on accountability, choice, and transparency. They are the magic trinity for the future of education reform. Accountability is the essence of standards-based reform, the idea that results matter and people have to be held to account for these results. Choice is an entire set of marketplace stratagems that by and large have not yet had a fair test in the American educational environment. Finally, transparency is the idea that anybody should be able to see where public money is going and how well are children learning. NCLB will do much to improve the transparency side of the trinity as far as achievement is concerned, but it is still relatively weak on the financial transparency issue.

Mark Tucker
National Center on Education and the Economy

Unlike most of my colleagues, I think that A Nation at Risk mostly got it wrong. The report basically charges that the performance of American education at the time it was written had declined precipitously. There is actually no evidence for that assertion. In a Ford Foundation report from 1988, researchers found that from 1971 to 1984 reading proficiency for all white thirteen-year-olds had improved 5.7 percent while the scores of black and Hispanic thirteen-year-olds had improved 19 percent and 10 percent respectively. This is not a record of precipitous decline. A Congressional Budget Office report in 1986 documented a decline in scores in the 1960s and early 1970s that was followed by an increase that began in the mid 1970s and continued right up to 1986, three years after A Nation at Risk was released. During this period all children improved, but low-income minority children gained the fastest. A report by the same author in 1987 found that the decline in SAT scores, the data that was A Nation at Risk’s only evidence of the decline, was caused by larger numbers of students taking the test rather than a decline in aptitude.

In other words, A Nation at Risk sent us off in the wrong direction: Its theme was paradise lost, and the answer was supposed to be paradise regained. If we had allowed ourselves to fall from some pinnacle of achievement, then the obvious answer would be to reinstate policies that were once in place. In reality there is no evidence that there ever was a paradise of this kind, and there is much evidence to the contrary. The report received so much attention because despite getting the problem wrong, and the solution wrong, it managed to focus the nation’s attention on education performance at just the right time.

A Nation at Risk

failed to recognize that demographics had changed since the perceived paradise of the first half of the twentieth century. They thought that the major change was in the performance of schools. They were utterly wrong. We had in fact slowly been improving the performance of the system. What changed was the world around us. Whereas for years we could run an economy in which kids coming out of high school with an eighth grade level of literacy could do well, build a family, even send their kids to college, we now faced a world in which high-school graduates with an eighth-grade literacy level were facing disaster. Research shows that you cannot support a family with that level of literacy. We are nearing a situation where almost everyone will need to be educated at a level that we had only educated 15 percent of our people before. That challenge does not require reinstating policies from the past, but reconceiving the whole operation.

For solutions, we must take a lesson or two from the other nations in the world whose students are consistently higher achievers than ours. What are these nations with stellar education records, nations as different as Japan and Sweden, doing that we are not? Each of these nations had standards for their kids through at least the age of fourteen and most until age sixteen. They typically had a standard curriculum with few choices, standardized assessments where there was a clear consensus on what made for a passing answer, and narrative statements about what kids should know and be able to do. These attributes are not cultural. These models prevail in countries as different as Singapore and Flemish Belgium.

A Nation at Risk

was right for the wrong reasons. The answer is not restoring policies of the 1950s; that would be a disaster. It is setting world-class academic standards for our children and then doing whatever is necessary to get them there.

AEI research assistant Andrew Kelly prepared this summary.