Leftover business: that the nation is still debating—and has yet to address—many of the issues raised by A Nation at Risk is a testament to its prescience - Forum

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by Milton Goldberg

For someone who was "present at the creation," revisiting A Nation at Risk is at once satisfying and unsettling. Satisfying because this retrospective confirms that, whatever else may be said of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, its words are still taken seriously by serious people. But unsettling because both the praise and the laments offered by the members of the Koret Task Force seem strangely disconnected from (or at downright variance with) the national concerns that first gave rise to Risk, as well as from its intent and sometimes its actual words.

Given Risk's impact, it still comes as something of a surprise to me (as it has on other occasions since 1983) to find that the main critical arrow of the task force's retrospective is misaimed. Observers continue to take exception not to what the report actually said, but to what it failed to say--complaining, for instance, that the report didn't deal enough with X, Y, or Z, or offered an "incomplete diagnosis" of the problem in American education, or that it wasn't "radical" enough in its analysis or prescriptions.

Particularly off target is the task force's allegation that Risk was unconcerned with the problems of elementary education. A careful reading of Risk's introduction yields a simple explanation: "The Commission's charter directed it to pay particular attention to teenage youth, and we have done so largely by focusing on high schools. Selective attention was paid to the formative years spent in elementary schools" (emphasis added). While the commission repeatedly recognized the importance of K-8 education as the foundation for secondary school in both its analysis and its recommendations, its focus remained on secondary education. That was the mandate handed down by Terrel H. Bell, then the secretary of education, and supported via the leadership of the commission chairman, David P. Gardner. Rather than wander from issue to issue, the commission stuck to its charge.

In addition, the Koret Task Force claims that the commission "was either too obtuse or too naive to take on the basic functioning and political control of the system itself." While the commission's obtuseness or naivete are open to debate, it is true that the commission did not view the political structures of American education as the most blatant problem. The commission was alarmed more immediately by what it saw as a grave national peril stemming from the steady degeneration of (particularly) secondary education into a kind of curricular smorgasbordism.

With the flawless vision of 20 years of hindsight, it is easy enough for any of us to point out that structural flaws of power and control lay at the root of America's education problems in 1983 and now--flaws which, in the commission's defense, they were as aware of as today's second-guessers. But this was precisely where the commission made a wise choice. Rather than stoke the coals of a fruitless debate over the power politics of American education, particularly at a time when the very fate of the U.S. Department of Education was in doubt, the commission chose to address four crucial reforms--of content, expectations, time, and teaching--that could be worked on immediately, irrespective of the power context.

As to whether Risk was "radical enough" in its prescriptions, it again strikes me that only the perspective from 20 years later could make the commission's recommendations appear retrospectively tame. The atrophy of memory obscures the fact that they simply weren't seen that way at the time. On the contrary, the operational implications of the Excellence Commission were received in many quarters as wrenching in both their presuppositions and structural consequences:

* No less than a whole new curriculum was envisioned for high schools, one that would be stringent across the board, but particularly so in areas critical to the national interest--mathematics, science, foreign languages, and computer science. The designation of computer science as an instructional "basic" for American education placed it, for the first time, on a par with math, science, English, the social sciences, and the arts.

* The commission insisted on more rigorous and measurable standards, calling for a national (but not federal) system of student assessment. This recommendation was sufficiently radical to guarantee that states would still be wrestling with it in 2003, in the context of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

* The commission's recommendation on time was a call for longer school days and years. The issue of time was sufficiently beneath the radar in 1983 that it took the Department of Education another 11 years to address it in any depth. Even today, the in-school time of American students, still driven by a calendar from an agricultural age, does not begin to approach that spent by students in many other countries.

* A side-by-side reading of Risk and various reports on teaching that have appeared since reveals the teaching recommendations of Risk to be eerily prescient, if not always sufficiently radical.