'A Nation at Risk': How much of 'apocalyptic' education report still applies?

But researchers taking a closer look have been pushing back on how such data are interpreted.

“We’re actually doing better than we think,” says Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, who has helped develop some of the PISA indicators. People often look at how students do on average, but forget to take into account factors such as income level, he says. But if you compare how countries are doing educating students who are not poor, the US ranks very well.

Other countries also struggle to educate children who are poor, but the US has a higher share of them.

“We have a crisis in education today, but it’s in educating children of poverty,” Professor Miron says. Some great school reforms are happening, but in many places beset by poverty, he says, children are chronically absent from school to baby-sit siblings or help supplement the family income – and lifting poverty “is more than the schools can do by themselves.”

Finland, one of the top performers on international tests, underwent a period of 30 years of systematic reform to reach that status – largely based on American research about what works well in education and teacher development, Miron notes. But in the US, reforms tend to be ideologically driven rather than research-based, he says.

“The next party will come in and probably reverse things,” he says. “That’s not a good way to do school reform.”

Miron was a young teacher when “A Nation at Risk” came out, and from his perch, it seemed that a period of teacher bashing followed.

Today, he says, the media are better able to find sources to offer counterpoints to similar reports, such as the recent one calling education problems a national-security threat, by a commission chaired by former New York City schools chief Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. That report called for more emphasis on science, technology, and foreign-language instruction, but also promoted conservative staples such as charter schools and vouchers. Critics noted that if there really were an imminent threat to national security, the authors should be willing to recommend greater resources for public schools.

“A Nation at Risk” focused mostly on high schools. Far too many, it said, offered “a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.”

In 1979, 4 out of 10 high school students took “general track” courses rather than a college-preparatory or vocational curriculum, it noted. By contrast, many industrialized nations required science and math for all students, and they spent about three times as many hours on those subjects as even the American students who took them all four years of high school.

The report also said American students should spend more time in school, to better compete with international peers.

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