A Nation at Risk famously declared crisis in American education. Even today, 20 years after the report's release, we cling to its message, which Mr. Bracey shows to be as flawed as it was compelling. TWENTY YEARS ago this month, James Baker, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, and Mike Deaver, Reagan's close advisor, defeated Attorney General Meese in battle of White House insiders. Over Meese's strong objections, they persuaded President Reagan to accept A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell had convened the commission. In his memoir, The Thirteenth Man, Bell recalled that he had sought Sputnik-type occurrence that would dramatize all the constant complaints about education and its effectiveness that he kept hearing. Unable to produce such an event, Bell settled for booklet with 36 pages of text and 29 pages of appendices about who had testified before the commission or who had presented it with paper. Meese and his fellow conservatives hated A Nation at Risk because it did not address any of the items on President Reagan's education agenda: vouchers, tuition tax credits, restoring school prayer, and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Baker called those issues extraneous and irrelevant. He and the moderates on the White House staff thought the report contained lot of good stuff to campaign on.1 The President accepted the report, but his speech acknowledging it largely ignored the report's content and simply reiterated his own agenda. According to Bell, the speech was virtually identical to the draft of Reagan speech that he had read and rejected the previous day. The Washington Post called it homily. Bell tells of looking around as Reagan spoke and noticing that Ed Meese was standing there with big smile on his face.2 Despite Meese's sabotage, A Nation at Risk played big in the media. In the month following its publication, the Washington Post carried 28 stories about it. Few were critical. Joseph Kraft did excoriate conservatives for using the report to beat up on liberals without offering anything constructive. William Buckley chided it for recommendations that you and I would come up with over the phone. The New York Times humor columnist Russell Baker contended that sentence containing phrase like a rising tide of mediocrity wouldn't be worth than C in tenth-grade English. About the authors' writing overall, Baker said, I'm giving them an A+ in mediocrity.3 Any students who were in first grade when A Nation at Risk appeared and who went directly from high school graduation into the work force have now been there almost nine years. Those who went on to bachelor's degrees have been on the job for nearly five years. Despite the dire predictions of national economic collapse without immediate education reform, our national productivity has soared since those predictions were made. What, then, are we to make of A Nation at Risk 20 years on? The report's stentorian Cold War rhetoric commanded and still commands attention: 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 (p. 5). By contrast, the report's recommendations were, as Buckley and others observed, banal. They called for nothing new, only for more of the same: more science, more mathematics, more computer science, more foreign language, more homework, more rigorous courses, more time-on- task, more hours in the school day, more days in the school year, more training for teachers, more money for teachers. Hardly the stuff of revolution. And even those mundane recommendations were based on set of allegations of national risk that Peter Applebome of the New York Times later called brilliant propaganda.4 Indeed, the report was veritable treasury of slanted, spun, and distorted statistics. …
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Apr 2, 2024
Charles L Glenn 
Open Access