This Day in Education History ("A Nation at Risk")

April 26, 1983—In one of its periodic fits of hysteria about why its children weren't learning, the American public embraced a Presidential commission's report, A Nation at Risk, that might (or might not) have correctly diagnosed what was wrong and might (or might not) have demonstrated why this problem represented a full-blown crisis. But the report unquestionably saved a major new federal department from the budget ax.

Too bad the report couldn't have been issued closer to Thanksgiving, when it could have enabled the Department of Education to earn a Presidential reprieve along with at least one lucky member of a prominent species that otherwise ends up on everyone's carving table in the holidays.

Somebody help me out here—can you think of another Presidential administration besides Ronald Reagan's that used Presidential commissions so often and with so much publicity? The Greenspan Commission, for instance, gave Reagan a veneer of bipartisan cover that allowed him to make adjustments in Social Security without Democrats making stick the usual charges that he was going to leave golden-agers out in the streets. The Rogers Commission, investigating the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, made famous the phrase "O ring" in its postmortem on that disaster.

The most famous of them all, the Tower Commission Report, explained how the Iran-contra affair could have taken place (because of Reagan's "management style," as laissez-faire, evidently, as his belief in economics) in a way that spared the American public from conducting yet another impeachment investigation of a President (only this time it wouldn't have involved a shifty-eyed paranoid who obsessed about everything in the White House, but instead a genial grandpa who acted a bit out to lunch whenever he talked about trees causing more pollution than automobiles or whenever he forgot that Samuel Pierce was his own Secretary of Housing and Urban Development).

But the 18 members of the commission assigned to look into education might have made an even bigger mark, because just about all Americans are concerned about schools, or should be. If you're not directly concerned because you have a kid in school, you're probably paying attention to it anyway because a healthy educational system makes your community (and, hence, your real estate) a lot more attractive, while an unhealthy one eats up your tax dollars with virtually nothing to show for it.

Unlike other commissions that waste acres of national forests with policy pronouncements in the form of MEGO ("my eyes glaze over") prose and appendices, this one endeared itself instantly to harried editors (desperate for a headline) and their reporters (desperate to find someone who agreed with them without having to put words in their mouths), with a dramatic—I would argue, hyperbolic—opening:

"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. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

A high-school teacher at the time who helped write the report, Jay Sommer, told USA Today recently, "In order to move a nation to make changes, you have to find some very incisive language."

Well, with language like what I just quoted, or the commission's warning that the educational system was being engulfed in "a rising tide of mediocrity," the report sure used that kind of apocalyptic lingo. It reminds me a bit of Senator Arthur Vandenberg's sage advice to the Truman Administration on how to win support for his plan to resist communism from a Congress still filled with isolationist mossbacks: "Scare the hell out of the American people."

The martial rhetoric also calls to mind the national handwringing that occurred after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. For nearly a century and a half after Congress greeted John Quincy Adams like a skunk in a perfume factory for proposing a national astronomical observatory, our nation's capital wanted nothing, nothing, to do with funding science and or math/science education. But the thought that we might be losing the space race put the fear of God into our nation's lawmakers, and like a dam breaking, money gushed out to teach kids about integers and molecules and planets in the form of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

Not that there wasn't anything wrong with our nation's schools 25 years later, and—let's give A Nation at Risk some credit here—the report documented a number of them. Things like dropping SAT scores; the fact that only one-third of 17-year-olds could solve a math problem requiring several steps; the inability of four-fifths of teenagers o write a decent persuasive essay; and, most tragically, because of the quiet economic prison sentence they received, the illiteracy of millions of adults. The concentrated focus on these and similar facts undoubtedly led education historian Diane Ravitch to call A Nation at Risk "the most important education reform document of the 20th century."

All of this assumed suddenly larger proportions because of the backdrop of the times, however. Not only was the Soviet bear still growling in 1983, but now there was another menace: Japan, whose economic competitiveness had helped put out of work millions of Americans in smokestack industries during the recent recession. What did Japan have that we didn't? Smarter kids, for one, according to A Nation at Risk and other experts at the time. Okay, let's get smarter kids, came the American response.

Was there such a clear connection between smarter Japanese kids and smarter Japanese economic performance? After the Japanese economy tanked in the mid-1990s (taking with it foreign bestsellers like The Japan That Can Say No and American jeremiads like Michael Crichton's highly problematic techno-thriller Rising Sun), beleaguered American teachers weren't shy about disputing this notion. One might also argue that, relatively speaking, A Nation at Risk didn't highlight as much as it could have the decisive importance of stable families in ensuring the community vitality and individual psychological health necessary to sustain student performance.

The situation was not as clear-cut as the NEA or the '80s educational "reformers" claimed, though. In his memoir of his life in government, In History’s Shadow, John Connally bragged about something decidedly unconservative: getting the Texas legislature to fork up more money for education—or, at least, for the state's college and universities. His explanation was simple: a strong college system, particularly in the sciences, will attract more businesses, especially in high-tech areas.

Now, the lanky Texan had his share of character defects (after the longtime "Tory Democrat" joined the Nixon Administration as Treasury Secretary and even endorsed his Republican boss for a second term, wags in his home state claimed that at the Alamo he would have formed a committee called "Texans for Santa Ana"). But I believe he was onto something here. Certainly, Massachusetts' generous funding of its collegiate system has helped ameliorate the effects of a tax system that in other ways can be confiscatory.

But, no matter how flawed the education commission might have been about the link between education and competitiveness, it did at least one thing: Save the Education Department.

From day one, Reagan had been eyeing the department, one of the major innovations of his predecessor Jimmy Carter, much like the “meek little wives” of Raymond Chandler’s classic short short “Red Wind,” as they “feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

Education Secretary Terrel Bell also seemed at that point just the way he pictured himself in the title of his memoir, The Thirteenth Man—i.e., the junior member of the Reagan cabinet and, hence, the low man on the totem pale. The report, however, gave him and his department a reason for existence, because it argued that there was indeed a federal role for education. Despite the strongest efforts of conservatives such as Ed Meese, the Education Department escaped its planned demise—and, in the hands of Bell's successor, William Bennett, even became something of a bully pulpit for those of his mindset.

I don't share conservatives' instinctive distrust of all government, but I wonder if liberals' audible sighs of relief—and even self-congratulation—after A Nation at Risk might not have been a bit premature. The increasing involvement of the federal government in education is not an unalloyed good.

Some years ago, a local dentist explained why he had become such a gadfly at board of education meetings (and, eventually, why he came to serve on one such institution). Americans, he thought, had come to feel powerless to effect change—Washington was simply too big, too far away. Local government, and especially local education, was the one area where one person could still really make a difference and see it, though.

Today, that's becoming increasingly hard to argue. Federal K-12 education spending has grown from $16 billion in 1980 to nearly $72 billion in 2007, and with increasing federal money has come increasing federal interference in how districts use the money.

One of my friends, in her days as a former teacher, railed against the No Child Left Behind Act and its prime mover, President George W. Bush. Among the law's effects, she argued convincingly, was that it made educators teach to the test and that it unfairly penalized teachers who were stuck with the worst students.

Complaints about the legislation have been so universal that I have little doubt that, aside from the administration's disastrous performance during Hurricane Katrina, this piece of well-intended but misbegotten legislation will eventually be seen as the worst aspect of domestic policy during the Bush Administration. But it also makes one agree with Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

So liberals might ask themselves: Which do you prefer tangling with--a local board of education that you can defeat at the next election--one that at least knows you and your problems--or Dubya, who doesn't know you from Adam and might not care?

The defense rests.