Unrecognized progress: today's schools are undeniably better than the schools of 1983, and a trio of recent reforms is making them even better

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by James B. Hunt, Jr.

THE KORET TASK FORCE DOES A VALUABLE SERVICE for American education. Its recommendations are largely on target as we stick with the task of improving our schools and move toward the goal of "leaving no child behind." But I see the events of the past 20 years in a different light. Our educators, students, parents, and policymakers deserve much more credit for what has been accomplished. While improvement has come in fits and starts--and detoured into a number of dead-ends--American education is better today than it was in 1983. And we are on the verge of making it much better.

I was governor of North Carolina in 1983 when the National Commission on Excellence in Education released A Nation at Risk. Against heavy opposition, I had pushed hard to begin statewide testing of our public school students. Our early assessments had revealed major deficiencies. Risk showed that this was a nationwide phenomenon. Many policymakers sensed that the report would provide a major boost to our efforts to bring about serious change in education.

As chairman of the Education Commission of the States (ECS) at that time, I pushed other governors and corporate CEOs to address the problem with a high-level "Task Force on Education for Economic Growth," thus establishing the vital link between education and economic growth that has fueled so many of the ensuing efforts to improve schools at the state level. Its calls for higher standards in schools and mastery of the basic competencies required for a globally competitive work force were warmly received by the National Governors Association (NGA). Candidates who might once have touted themselves as the "Jobs Governor" suddenly found that the way to attract employers to their states was to become an "Education Governor."

The release of Risk acted like a meteor hitting the ocean, creating tidal waves of reform everywhere. Another report of the mid-1980s, the Carnegie Corporation's A Nation Prepared (see Chester E. Finn Jr., "High Hurdles," p. 62), sparked a long focus on excellence in teaching in an effort to define what Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey, termed "what accomplished teachers need to know and be able to do' Nearly every leader of the NGA, Republicans and Democrats alike, made education, standards, and economic competitiveness a theme of his chairmanship. Then, in 1989, the governors and President George H.W. Bush held the nation's first education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and formulated national education goals for America.

Three major developments of the past 20 years are now bearing fruit: 1) the creation of standards and accountability; 2) research on how the brain develops in early childhood and its implications for pre-K education and child care; and 3) an emerging focus on the single biggest factor in student achievement--teacher quality.

Standards and Accountability

While the Koret report finds that "standards-based reforms ... though promising ... are hard to get right." the truth is that most states have been working hard to "get it right" and have met with good success, Groups like Achieve, the Business Roundrable, ECS, and the recent summits led by IBM CEO Louis Gerstner have had a real impact. Most of the nation's governors have gotten the message: if you aren't pushing hard to set high standards and making considerable progress toward achieving them, your state will not be "the place" for business to locate and jobs to be created.

Only a handful of states now lack standards. Most need better standards than they have, but they have made a good start. In 1983 only a handful of states had any standards, and we were measuring progress in education almost solely by the increase in spending rather than achievement.

It is easy to criticize the work of states and school districts on standards, but dedicated teachers, principals, superintendents, and curriculum experts have spent untold hours trying to build their systems. They deserve our commendation. Some were especially bold. Virginia and Massachusetts can attest to the agony involved in setting high standards and, as a result, having many students fail the exams. But they can also attest to the value of sticking with this venture--providing greater support to students and teachers and thus seeing test scores climb dramatically. Others are emulating them.

Any fair assessment of the events of the two decades since Risk must conclude that we are well on our way to high and rigorous standards and accountability. We should be proud of that progress and committed to do a lot better.

Ready to Learn

The Koret report hardly mentions one of the most important developments since Risk: science's remarkable progress in understanding how a child's brain develops in the earliest years and the ensuing efforts to provide the early child care and education necessary for school readiness.

We now know that all children are born with about the same number of brain cells, billions of them. But the capacity for intelligence is largely set early in the child's life, when those brain cells are connected up. These connections are formed largely from stimulation--hearing sounds, seeing colors, feeling things, responding to love and care.