This is a two-part post. Today is Part I; Part II will follow on Thursday.
On Sunday, education historian Diane Ravitch looked back forty years to an event that poisoned our thinking about public schools. Today’s education reform movement, explains Ravitch, began in 1983 with a government report from President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education—A Nation at Risk: “The commission claimed that the nation’s schools were mired in a sea of mediocrity, that test scores were on a downward spiral, and that the nation’s public schools were responsible for the loss of major industries to other nations.”
Ravitch describes the result: A Nation at Risk blamed public school mediocrity for what it said was our nation’s loss of world economic superiority and sold policy makers on the idea that something must be done. Standards-based school accountability struck policymakers as a good idea, and a few years later, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, embodied the notion that teachers could be forced to raise test scores on demand. Test-and-punish accountability, Ravitch explains, “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”
Ravitch attributes our problems today to four big lies underneath the education policies set in place by No Child Left Behind, Race to the top, and many of the policies that dominate recent legislation across the states:
- “test scores are reliable indicators of school and teacher quality;”
- “teachers need not be professional to get good results;”
- “the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government;,” and
- “vouchers will produce higher test scores.”
Ravitch directs our attention to James Harvey, who retired in 2021 as executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. Back in 1983, however, Harvey served as staff to the President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, which produced A Nation at Risk. Ravitch wants us to remember Harvey’s assessment today of how the Commission’s work went wrong: “The data were cherry-picked to paint the schools in the worst possible light. The conclusions were a lie. The report ignored positive findings and chose to ignore the students living in poverty, the students with disabilities, and the other socioeconomic challenges facing the nation’s schools.”
In April, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss published James Harvey’s story of what happened as the Commission on Excellence in Education developed the report: “The staff thought the report would be based on the evidence we received during the first 12 months of the committee’s life from hearings and some 40 papers commissioned from academic experts. It wasn’t… I developed two successive white papers reflecting on what we had heard from experts on the complexities of the school “system” in the United States. The essence of the two lengthy papers was that American schools had accomplished great things for the United States and were now faced with the joint challenges of (1) successfully educating a more diverse and lower-income population through high school, and (2) improving standards or we risked becoming mired in mediocrity.”
But the commission moved in a different direction: “Virtually every reference to the accomplishments of American schools and the challenges of diversity and poverty disappeared from the succeeding drafts. At the meeting to discuss my second draft, (Gerald) Holton (a member of the Commission and a professor of physics at Harvard University) showed up with a brilliant polemic, a handwritten draft he had developed. He read it aloud to the assembled commissioners. Castigating American public schools for the failures of American society and in particular the nation’s declining economic competitiveness, it became the foundation of “A Nation at Risk.”
Harvey continues: “Holton’s draft went through 10 revisions as the commission cherry-picked and misinterpreted data to fix the facts in support of its argument… What the report didn’t say was that the steady declines had been eliminated in the 1982 NAEP assessment… But according to the commission writing the report, public schools were responsible for Japan eating our economic lunch and for ‘one great American industry after another falling to world competition.'”
Harvey traces several serious consequences back to A Nation at Risk. Education policy has focused on sanctions for schools and teachers and demands that they raise test scores at all costs. “We have become an achievement-test-obsessed society,” with “an undertow helping undermine confidence in educators and public schools while trashing government generally.”
At the same time, “Distracted by the false argument that most of our economic problems can be laid at the school door, policymakers have been able to ignore major problems including growing inequality, homelessness, drug addiction, and the epidemic of gun violence in the United states. Perversely, the report created the conditions in which… right-wing critics have now cast… (schoolteachers) in the role of villains in the culture wars.”
Poignantly, Harvey concludes: “One of the tragedies around A Nation at Risk was not simply that it misdiagnosed the problem and put forth ersatz solutions, but that it refused to face up to the financial implications of its argument. Staff suggestions that there be some budget response to the definition of a national catastrophe were dismissed…. Had the commission entered the treacherous waters of school finance—which promotes inequity in public education, with a system that relies in large part on local property taxes—it would inevitably have had to deal with the troublesome issue of childhood poverty and unequal opportunity, a topic that commission leaders avoided.”
Part II of this post, on Thursday, will examine one example today of A Nation at Risk‘s tragic consequences.