A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017

(Author’s note: In the spring of 1996 I began to work as an editor/writer for a newly created non-profit called the “Education Statistics Services Institute,” whose sole function was to support the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education. I was assigned work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a fortunate happenstance, for “NAEP” was to grow substantially in importance, visibility, and funding for all the 19 years I spent working for ESSI and its successor configurations. Working on NAEP was the best employment experience of my life. The work was congenial and the NCES staff were the brightest, most committed people I ever worked with. Readers can decide for themselves if this experience made me “partial” in any way.)

In April 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the brainchild of Secretary of Education Terrell Bell, published a report, A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, unleashing on an unsuspecting public some of the most stentorian, and some of the most effective, prose in bureaucratic history:

“Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

“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. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”

You may gather from my title that I disagree with the report. It is worth remarking that the report was released on the cusp of the computer revolution, a revolution that was, to a very great extent, a “Made in America” enterprise, despite the widespread dispersal of technological expertise across the world, and a revolution that will, I believe, reshape the world as the printing press reshaped first Europe and then the world. The makers of this new revolution were, almost uniformly, the froth on that alleged “rising tide of mediocracy” against which Terrell Bell’s minions warned so earnestly. Today, of course, 30 years after these dire warnings, the U.S. economy is easily the strongest in the world, and our higher education system is the envy if not the despair of our competitors.

But enough gloating on my part. Let’s get back to A Nation At Risk and the circumstances of its birth.

If you were covering politics in the U.S. in 1980, as I was, you knew that the Reagan Administration came in with a “roll back” agenda: yeah, they were going to roll back communism, but first they were going to roll back the bureaucracy, right here in the U.S. of A, starting with the heart of the matter, wicked old D.C.

The first order of the bureaucracy-cutting business, according to the Reganaughts, was to concentrate power in the White House. You can’t trust cabinet secretaries to do the job. You just can’t. No matter who he is, as soon as he sits in that great big chair behind that great big desk in that great big office, he’ll go native on you. And that’s precisely what happened to Terrell Bell, Reagan’s first secretary of education—the most hated of all government bureaucracies, in the eyes of the White House, and understandably so, because it was created by the Carter Administration in large part as a favor to the teachers unions.

Yes, Bell went native. In fact, he was already half-native, having been U.S. Commissioner of Education under both Presidents Nixon and Ford in the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare.¹ As it turned out, Bell was not the man to undo the new Department. Unlike Don Regan, first Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and then White House chief of staff, he lacked “Fuck you money”. Bell liked his big new office and his big limo and the classy invites—first dibs on virtually every happening thing in DC, not to mention literally thousands of senators, representatives, and other lesser beings anxious to tell you what a great guy you were. Surrounded by all that glittered, Bell turned to his staff and said, essentially, “Give us a reason to exist.” And they did.

You don’t have to spend much time in DC to learn that we are a nation of windows, windows of risk, of opportunity, of vulnerability, windows that are opening and closing with great alacrity, all of them demanding Action! Now! Literally hundreds of reports have been written since 1984, I am sure, written with the same passion and the same surety as A Nation At Risk, yet I am also sure that none of them have had the same impact. It’s worth asking why.

Terrell Bell, born in 1921, was in his early sixties when the report was released. He graduated from high school in 1939, when the high school graduation rate in the U.S. was about 25%, and in his home state of Idaho it was almost surely below that average. The vast majority of Americans were “drop outs”, starting their working lives at age 15, and, often, earlier. There are no data on drop-out rates prior to the late 1950s, because until then dropping out was the norm. It was only in the late 1960s, in conjunction with the maturing of the civil rights movement, that the notion began to emerge that every student ought to graduate from high school, and it was only in the 1970s that this idea became accepted throughout the U.S.² Shocking as it may sound today—shocking if not inconceivable—high schools were once elite institutions. The high-school diploma, not the college degree, was the hallmark of the middle class.³ Only young adults—those in their mid-thirties and younger—were likely to be familiar with high schools that were not elite institutions. And the Reagan Administration was not a country for young men.

The “innocent” collision of elitist expectations and non-elitist reality had occurred before. The 1950s are recalled today by most conservatives as a halcyon era of high expectations, but such decidedly not the case at the time. One of the most famous educational reform books ever written, Why Johnnie Can’t Read, written in a white heat in 1955 by a man named Rudolf Flesch, denounced the “dumbed down” (my word) texts of the day, claiming (correctly) that the U.S. was the only country in the world that had remedial reading classes but ignoring the fact that the U.S. was also the only country in the world trying to educate 50%, rather than 10%, of its student population (“the upper half of the distribution”, as we say today).⁴ Flesch’s successors in rage collided with a school system trying to educate the entire distribution, something entirely without precedent in human history.

Terrell Bell had wanted to make his “National Commission” a presidential commission, but Reagan turned him down, not wanting to give the project so much visibility. If Ronald Reagan had been a skilled bureaucratic infighter, he would have said yes and then stacked it with staff that would have turned out a soporific report taking a few pot shots at teachers’ unions, followed by a laundry list of vague “reforms”. But Reagan was not a skilled bureaucratic infighter and by denying Bell’s request he allowed the once-despised Education Department to re-invent itself as the sworn enemy of the NEA rather than its tool.

I would imagine that Bell’s staffers, even the most optimistic, were stunned by their own success. The commission that wrote A Nation at Risk was headed by Milton Goldberg, a career educator who had started out teaching in Philadelphia before transferring first to academia and then to the Education Department itself in 1975. Neither Dr. Goldberg nor the rest of the staff appear to be particularly political. One can only guess that they were educators entirely out of sympathy the strategies developed by “progressive” educators to cope with the burden of educating all of the kids who had once been pushed out of the school system entirely.

Although intensely “educated” and rigorous in tone, the report is entirely unscientific. It’s doubtful that Goldberg had any understanding of the methods needed for the analysis of quantitative data. Instead, the report is nothing more than an exercise in self-righteous cherry-picking. Whatever confirms the pre-chosen thesis is relevant; everything that contradicts it is excluded.

A Nation at Risk makes no reference to the massive changes that had taken place in American education since the civil rights revolution of the sixties, and the consequent expansion of the senior high-school population to include the entire birth cohort (individuals with the same birth year). The report emphasized the decline in SAT scores from 1963 to the early 1980s without remarking that the percentage of students taking the SAT had increased greatly during the same period.⁵ The report cited declining scores for 17-year-olds on the NAEP science assessment (though NAEP was not mentioned by name), but ignored results from the NAEP reading assessment that showed increased scores for 9- and 13-year-old students.⁶

Similarly, A Nation At Risk reports “alarming” international comparisons without mentioning that, at the time, the U.S. educational system was much broader and less elitist than the systems of other countries. The report stated that “the South Koreans recently built the world’s most efficient steel mill,” as though this were an indictment of U.S. schools rather than U.S. Steel (and the United Steelworkers).

The news that many American students lacked the intellectual proficiency of a Harvard graduate seemed to stun the U.S. media. Largely reared in elite environments themselves, reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and the “Big Three” networks, which largely set the media agenda back in those far-off times, were “naively egalitarian”, assuming that “since I’m average, everyone ought to be like me”, thinking that they were “average” when compared to their peers, as indeed they were. But they were not “average” when compared to the 50% of the population that was below average, or the 75% percent of the population that was not “above average”. Even more to the point, they are very unlikely to have had much experience interacting with people who actually are “average”, not to mention those well below average.

The 1980s saw the development of the modern “upper middle class”, which shapes so much of American society today. According to the New York Times, in 1967, 7% of American families had an income of $100,000 or more a year (using 2013 dollars). By the mid-eighties, that figure had climbed to 19%. The success of supply-side economics, brought on by the “Reagan Revolution”, gave enormous prestige to the notion of competitiveness, a notion that would embraced by Democrats during the “Clinton Revolution, when liberals learned that they could make as much money as conservatives. Competitiveness became the ethos and fetish of the new, meritocratic upper middle class, competitiveness as an end in itself in every aspect of life. At the same time, for the first time in modern history, the U.S. had lost the overwhelming economic pre-eminence that had been taken for granted for generations. Japan was widely seen as the new colossus, while the U.S. seemed to be falling far, far behind. Endless stories of Japan’s ferociously competitive secondary school system bewitched the chattering classes—ignoring the fact that only a small percentage of Japan’s students engaged in the “four beats five” frenzy.⁷

In the 20-odd years that I wrote about educational policy, the one thing that truly puzzled me was the almost universal, unthinking acceptance, on both the right and left, of calls for ever-more demanding curricula. Calculus in the eighth grade? Good! Calculus in the sixth grade? Better! Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica for pre-school? Bring it on! Educational “experts” are, obviously, likely to be people who excelled in school and always took advanced courses, but when they are prescribing for the “masses” they forget that they had elite schooling, and in fact often go beyond the courses they actually took and instead plump for the courses they wished they had taken. In attempting to be egalitarian—“if it was good enough for me at Pency Prep it should be good enough for everyone”—they end up being absurd.

The Reagan Revolution was not only concerned with sheer, or mere, economic competitiveness. They also wanted to take control of American education from the New Left, which had wrested it from Cold War liberals, largely on the basis of the Vietnam War. A Nation At Risk helped transform the Department of Education into a weapon in the eighties culture wars, and when Bell left the department in 1985 he was replaced by culture warrior William Bennett, who brought along with him fellow culture warriors Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch.⁸ Bennett, Finn, and Ravitch seized on NAEP as a device by which to “prove” the inferiority of the American education system.⁹

NAEP had been designed, in the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, to be as noncontroversial as possible. Students were tested at the national level only, and by age rather than grade, ensuring that state comparisons would be impossible. Scores were of course anonymous and, in any event, since no student took the entire exam, results were meaningful for student “populations” only and not for individual students.

NAEP was reworked in the late eighties. The “new NAEP” continued to assess student populations only, but added individual state assessments. State participation was voluntary, but most states participated. Under George H. W. Bush, an independent “National Assessment Governing Board” was created to set policy for NAEP. One of the board’s main tasks was to set up “Performance Standards” for each subject and grade—“Basic”, “Proficient”, and “Advanced”—with the goal of bringing performance up to the Proficient level for all students. Allowing for cross-state comparisons and the ability to rate student groups on how well they “should be doing” (using the achievement levels) made NAEP much more “media friendly.” The fact that the great percentage of students scored below the Proficient level in every subject gave the nation’s talking heads new confirmation for their pre-existing conviction that “American schools are lousy.”¹⁰

Publication of state results gave Bennett et al. a new stick with which to beat the liberals, because “liberal” states like California, New York, and New Jersey, heavy with black and Hispanic students, were predictably outperformed by “conservative”, all-white states like Kansas and New Hampshire. When sophisticates pointed out that adjusting state scores for the relative socio-economic status (“SES”) and race/ethnicity of the various states’ student populations erased virtually all differences in performance, Bennett and his gang accused them of being racist, despite the fact that these differences in performance, which were substantial, showed almost no variation from one state to another.

However, the state NAEP results were no comfort to the liberals either. Before and during the civil rights revolution of the fifties and sixties it had been perhaps the most deeply held conviction of liberals that the disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. in income, in drug and alcohol abuse, in illegitimacy, in educational performance, and in any number of other factors, were entirely the product of segregation. In an integrated society, the disparities would disappear. That did not happen. While a large percentage of black Americans did move closer to white, middle-class norms, they did not equal them. At the same time, a smaller, but significant population moved in the other direction. Instead of declining, crime rates for blacks soared, along with the percentage of black children born of unmarried mothers. Furthermore, as blacks began to gain political power in many of the nation’s great cities, one of the first things they did was to implement the notion of government as the employer of last resort—a government job was a job for life. This was already a goal of the public-sector unions, whose membership grew as governments grew in the era of the Great Society, and the teachers’ unions, buoyed by soaring expenditures on education, grew most of all.¹¹

All of these increased expenditures were expected to improve student performance, but that also did not happen. Disparities in educational performance, particularly high school drop-out rates, were considered to be proof of racial prejudice, and many school systems were quite willing to water down content and ignore substandard performance in order to keep black—and later, Hispanic—graduation rates high. Simply expanding the student body to encompass the entire “distribution” would be enough to guarantee a decline in “average” student performance, but efforts to avoid charges of racism had an additional effect. Liberals struggled desperately to solve these problems but often ended up trying to ignore them—for example, refusing to admit that many black educators felt no responsibility towards their students—and were punished over and over again at the polls.

When the Cold War ended, Republicans realized that domestic issues would come to the fore once more. The first President Bush held an elaborate “Education Summit” in 1989, promising to make America “first” in education. When Bill Clinton defeated Bush in 1992, he continued the focus on education. In 1996, he initiated the option of a voluntary “national” test, for reading at grade 4 and mathematics at grade 8, so that parents could compare their child’s learning with the national average. This provoked “social conservatives”—increasingly important in the Republican Party as the Democratic Party continued to “evolve” to the left on social issues¹²—to a fury, and the Republican Congress, goaded by their base, tore it to pieces.

In a nice illustration of the “law” of unintended consequences, one of the prime beneficiaries of A Nation At Risk was the National Education Association. Buoyed by the rising “Reagan Prosperity”, states responded to the report by throwing money at education. Thanks to the Reagan recovery, states now had more money to spend and they often spent it by hiring more teachers. The number of public school teachers in the U.S. rose from about 2.14 million in 1983 to about 3 million in 2000. Most of these teachers paid dues to the National Education Association (NEA), which replaced its worn headquarters on 16th Street a few blocks north of the White House with a fancy new building, which should probably be called the Terrell Bell Building.

Another nice illustration of the same law came with the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000. Despite conservative rage at Clinton’s national test, Republicans were well aware that most Americans wanted Washington to do “something” about education. In any event, Bush was quite education friendly himself. Once in office, Bush aggressively pushed the “No Child Left Behind Act,” which mandated extensive testing in mathematics and reading of all K-12 students, using state tests, and also effectively required all states to participate in NAEP. Schools whose students failed to meet “adequate yearly progress” towards performance standards to be set individually by each state would be first assisted but then ultimately punished.

NCLB was bitterly opposed, in private, by the teachers’ unions, who had to remain publicly silent, because congressional Democrats believed that the pressure for school accountability was impossible to resist. In addition, many Democrats had come to believe that the teachers’ unions were too often more concerned with teachers than students, and no longer saw them as allies in efforts to improve student performance, particularly among black and Hispanic students. Democrats forced Bush to earn their support by significantly increasing federal funding for education. They also included language in the legislation authorizing even larger expenditures—expenditures that the Bush administration was very unlikely to make—so that, if the expected improvements in student performance did not materialize, they could claim that Republican tight-fistedness was to blame. On the right, many “far right” conservatives sought to weaken the public school system, and thus teachers’ unions, by aggressively supporting school choice and including provisions that would punish schools that failed to show consistent increases in student performance.

Bush himself was not particularly antagonistic towards the teachers unions or the public schools. His own support for school reform, and his own ideas about what should be done, were drawn largely from the “Texas Miracle,” a long-standing educational reform movement in Texas initiated by H. Ross Perot in 1984 and passed during the administration of Democratic Governor Mark White. At that time, Perot was a source of fascination and pride in the Lone Star State, a diminutive man who looked nothing like the stereotypical Texas millionaire, but who was richer—and probably smarter—than any of them. Perot managed to convince the Texas business establishment that the Texas school system, then built very largely around football and 4-H fairs, needed to change. The teachers’ unions in Texas had originally opposed Perot’s reforms, but the eventual success of the program rallied support in Texas for the public schools, allowing the unions to thrive along with the schools in which their members taught.¹³

Up until September 11, NCLB was one of Bush’s pet projects. Despite the administration’s drastic re-evaluation of its priorities following the tragedies of that day, the NCLB reforms were instituted across the nation. The testing provisions of the act, both at the state and federal level, provided reams of information for everyone interested in education. The requirement for “disaggregation of data”—providing separate averages for a variety of student groups, including race/ethnicity and status as either a student with a disability or an English language learner, allowed non-experts to see the deep disparities in student performance by these categories at the state, district, and school level—disparities that often had gone unobserved in the past.

The NCLB reforms did not lead to the sort of sweeping improvements in education that many on the right had hoped for. However, the new focus on education reform—fed in part by the new information available, and the new awareness of the difficulties involved in producing increased student performance for large populations, help create more sophisticated efforts, perhaps most spectacularly in New York City during the first two terms of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Obama Administration expanded on the No Child Left Behind Act administratively rather than legislatively. The new administration had ideas very similar to those of the Bush Administration and, like the Bush Administration, regarded the teachers’ unions rather openly as “the enemy”. However justified the administration was in taking this attitude—and I think they were very justified—it significantly weakened Democratic support in Congress for the kinds of reforms the administration had in mind. Republicans, of course, set a price for their support—basically, a raft of explicitly anti-union measures—that no Democratic administration could afford to pay.

In any event, a backlash against No Child Left Behind had set in across the country, focused principally on all the testing, the massive emphasis on reading and mathematics, and the emphasis that school principals placed on those students who were on the edge of making “adequate yearly progress”—a sort of triage that could lead to the neglect of those at the bottom and the top. School administrators and teachers in low-income areas, particularly those with high percentages of black and Hispanic students, felt threatened by the possibility of administrative punishment. Parent of upper-middle-class students felt their children were being neglected. Predictably, the national media ridiculed the “low” performance standards set by many states. The fact that, often, a majority of students could not meet these standards was passed over as irrelevant. Supposedly intelligent, educated adults took it for granted that anything they found “easy” must be easy for a twelve-year-old child as well.

In the first years of the Obama Administration, pushback from educators was muted, in part because the administration, as part of its efforts to counter the Great Recession, was pouring large amounts of money into education, which counterbalanced the tendency of states to reduce funding. But as the economy improved, and the Obama Education Department continued its efforts to pressure the public schools to improve performance, resistance from the teachers’ unions grew.

The great issue of latter part of the Obama Administration was the “Common Core of Education”, effectively designed to set national performance standards in reading and mathematics to be used in all the 50 states, so that states could not “cheat” by setting their NCLB standards “too low”. This reform, aggressively backed by a variety of well-heeled, and well-meaning, upper-income reformer groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, became the target of passionate assaults from both the left and right, and the project, an extraordinarily ambitious one, became entangled in the “populist revolt” of the 2016 presidential primary campaign. States that agreed to participate began to back out, although it appears that often the substance of the Common Core standards was retained, covered by an opportune name change. However, the grand scheme, which would have allowed the ranking of every student’s performance across the nation, was wrecked.

Throughout all the sturm und drang of both the Bush and Obama years, student performance as measured by NAEP remained virtually flat. Then, in 2015, the national results for reading and mathematics showed declines from 2013 in both fourth and eighth grade mathematics, and for eighth grade reading, while the average score for fourth grade reading remained unchanged. This alone weakened the momentum for any of the various reform proposals as the second Obama administration drew to a close. The spectacle caused Tom Loveless, the Brookings Institution’s man about education, to sigh in wonder at how and why such a vast expenditure, in money, effort, and expertise at the federal level had failed to move the needle in the direction of higher performance.¹⁴ It’s only fair that I should answer Tom.

First of all, the simple fact is that the federal government lacks the muscle to decisively shape K-12 public education in the U.S. The largest pot of federal money for schools, Title I funding for disadvantaged students, amounts to $15 billion a year—money that, supposedly, can be withheld if states don’t comply with federal expectations. But total state and local K-12 expenditures run at about $500 billion a year. Still, states are reluctant to write off Title 1 money, but they rarely have to worry about doing so. They sometimes fear this can happen, but it very rarely does. Senators and representatives get elected to bring money to their states, not to take it away. Mere bureaucrats can get in a great deal of trouble by making the folks back home mad. Furthermore, it is very difficult for any administration to maintain constant pressure on the states to pursue a consistent policy. Education was perhaps the Bush Administration’s top priority, until 9/11, when it suddenly became 19th on a list of 25.

But beyond that are the questions of what parents actually want for their children and, even more shockingly, what children want for themselves. The all but universal position—the all but universal expressed opinion—among both credentialed and self-appointed experts is that parents of course want “the best” for their children—they want them to excel. But, clearly, I don’t believe that this is true. Or, rather, when parents say they want “the best”, they usually don’t mean they want their kids to excel in calculus, to have savored the ironies of The Ambassadors, or to speak fluent Mandarin. They want their kids to be happy, and they want their kids to have fun. Public high schools in comfortable—not opulent, but comfortable—suburbs are likely to have non-educational facilities—football stadiums and basketball courts, swimming pools, “Little Broadway” scale theatres, etc.—that would likely strike visitors from another country as something from another world. What has all this to do with education?

Reformers are, of course, very reluctant to blame parents, and even more reluctant to blame students themselves. Children, after all, are sacred. Well, sacred they be, but that doesn’t mean that they are all potentially obsessive-compulsive overachievers who just need a little prodding. I have read many books on educational reform, and they are all about what children ought to want rather than what they do want. But I do remember one in particular that, on its very last page, violated that rule, and talked about what children, or at least adolescents, do want. Speaking of the research they had done, the authors mentioned that they had visited a wide variety of schools and could find only one common factor. No matter where they went, no matter what the socio-economic makeup the student body, “the most admired members of the student body were the athletes.” One of my sisters offered a slightly different perspective: “High school is the time when shoes are the most important thing in the world.”

Most high school graduates in the U.S. do not go on to college. Most that do go to college go to non-competitive institutions, where, shockingly, they seem to spend almost as much time having “fun” as they did in high school. Yet the educational agenda for the entire student population should, in the eyes of virtually all “reformers” on the left and right, who myopically refuse to look at the people they are talking about, reflect the concerns of the credential-happy few who do seek admission to the same competitive-admission colleges from which the reformers themselves graduated.

From my point of view, the American educational system, for the most part, meets the expectations, and needs, of both parents and student to a far greater extent than any of the reformers, across the board from left to right, are willing to admit, or, in fact, are even capable of understanding. That is why the great conservative proposals for reforming education—charter schools and private school vouchers—that would allow the “magic of the market place” to push student performance upwards can have only limited impact. Most parents have what they want. Their kids attend schools that are safe (this is, in fact, the first priority for parents and the source of all the bizarre “zero tolerance” rules that, for a great many parents, are not bizarre at all) and that are part of their community, schools that serve as the center for their children’s social lives, not schools that require them to memorize and recite Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies.”¹⁵ And a great many parents who are not happy with their schools still do not want “demanding” schools because they don’t see “credentialism” beyond a simple, unadorned high school diploma as relevant to their children, nor do their children see it.

Does this mean there is no need for reform? Obviously, it doesn’t. There is a significant divide in educational attainment in the U.S., which reflects, of course, the significant divide in American society, the color line. If black and Hispanic students performed nearly as well as white students, there would be very little need for a discussion of education reform in the U.S. But they don’t, and so education reform, principally in terms of erasing these differences, is a necessary topic of discussion.

This potted history of mine probably sounds so jaundiced as to suggest that I don’t believe significant education reform is possible, even though necessary. That’s not true, though I am tempted to say that it takes a billionaire, for the two most dramatic, large-scale examples of successful education reform that I can think of are Texas and H. Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg in New York City. In Part II of this discussion, I’ll review these reform efforts and give some skeptical though I hope not despairing suggestions for further reform.