Something Old, Something New

Abstract

MY LIST of recommended readings for this summer consists of only two items. One is rather dated, and if you haven't read yet, don't bother. Its theme is echoed in about every resource you might have come across in the last two decades. The other one is new, but would probably not have been written if the first one had never been published. There is still some mystery surrounding why the publication of the first item, A Nation at Risk, became the point at which education reform blasted like rocket into an endless exploration of ways to improve schools. Let me begin by giving one version of why set the benchmark. A Nation at Risk is brief, written in style free of educational jargon and peppered with phrases that are as good as sound bites get. Yet this 1983 statement that connected global competition to the quality of education did not break any new ground. States had already begun to move on requiring at least minimal accountability from schools, and business leaders were using international test results to call for ratcheting up the output of U.S. education because Japan was soaring far ahead of us. Even those within the U.S. Department of Education who worked on A Nation at Risk were not sure how the document would be received. The late Terrel Bell, then secretary of education, might have had motive other than producing report on the status of public education when he appointed high-powered, nonpartisan commission to develop it. Conservative critics of Bell's department, created only few years earlier, wanted to get rid of before put down roots. As low-priority concern of the Reagan Administration, the department could have been wiped out easily or reduced to no more than data-gathering operation, as the Heritage Foundation and other conservative as the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups wanted. Indeed, President Reagan gave only perfunctory attention to A Nation at Risk when was released and rarely mentioned again. For reporters at some major newspapers, the release of the report was second-day story because few weeks earlier several members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education had spilled the beans about the report at meeting of the Education Writers Association in San Francisco. The reporters had already written their big pieces on it. What propelled the report to lasting public attention, in my opinion, was little-known event involving technology. The Internet was truly in its infancy, and at an organization I worked for, the National School Public Relations Association, we had developed crude daily news service for members that made use of the Internet. The director of NSPRA arranged to have disk copy of the report delivered to the office at the time of the release. Members had contacted their local newspapers to arrange for full transcripts of the report to be downloaded to them. This fledgling use of new technologies was so novel that dozens of newspapers picked up on and ran the full report the day after A Nation at Risk was released. Suddenly, a nation at risk became nation consumed by education reform. During the 1980s, many other similar reports and state-level commissions focused first on more of the same--longer school days and longer school years. Successive waves of reform dealt with curriculum and standards, teacher quality, systemic reforms, governance, early childhood education, and the alignment of assessments with standards. The No Child Left Behind Act ushered in government attitude of just do it for disadvantaged students, and the current wave of high school reforms is concentrating on students at the high end--the math and science talent that businesses say they need to remain competitive. …