Reporting for NPR in 2018 about A Nation at Risk, Anya Kamenetz noted:
When it appeared in April 1983, the report received widespread coverage on radio and TV. President Reagan joined the co-authors in a series of public hearings around the country.
The report’s narrative of failing schools — students being out-competed internationally and declining educational standards — persists, and has become an entrenched part of the debate over education in the U.S.
What ‘A Nation At Risk’ Got Wrong, And Right, About U.S. Schools
In 2023, writing for The Answer Sheet in The Washington Post, James Harvey explains that the report under Reagan was “gaslighting” for political purposes, and not the clarion call to address education reform that media, the public, and political leaders claimed.
In short, A Nation at Risk was a “manufactured crisis.”
Yet, education reform has become a central part of the political process for governors and presidents since the 1980s, reaching a critical peak under George W. Bush who turned the discredited “Texas Miracle” into groundbreaking and bipartisan federal legislation, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
In fact, public education in the US has been under an intense public and political microscope for forty years of high-stakes accountability. For educators, that accountability is indistinguishable regardless of the political party in the White House.
The Obama administration in many ways continued and even doubled-down on the crisis/miracle rhetoric found under W. Bush.
At the core of education crisis/miracle rhetoric has been the use and misuse of standardized test data.
For many decades, the media and public fretted over public education based on SAT data (and then ACT data), which represents the central issue of misunderstanding test scores (the College Board warns of not ranking states by SAT averages, yet the media persists) and misusing test data (SAT/ACT tests are designed to predict college success, not evaluate the quality of public education).
With the decrease in the influence of SAT/ACT testing, however, the media, public, and political leaders have focused more on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data.
Since 2019, there have been NAEP-inspired claims of educational crisis based on 2019 reading scores, 2022 math scores, and 2022 history/civics scores.
As one powerful example, high-profile media, The New York Times, and journalist, Nicholas Kristof, proclaim:
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It
However, despite warnings from 2016, Tom loveless explains:
In February, 2023 Bari Weiss produced a podcast, “Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read” and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, wrote “Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.” Both headlines are misleading. The 65% and two-thirds figures are referring to the percentage of 4th graders who scored below proficient on the last reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered in 2022.
The problem is this: scoring below proficient doesn’t mean “can’t really read” or “struggling to read.” It also does not mean “functionally illiterate” or identify “non- readers” as some of the more vituperative descriptions on social media have claimed. It doesn’t even mean “below grade level in reading,” one of the milder distortions.
Literacy and NAEP Proficient
Further, scholars Reinking, Hruby and Risko (2023), in fact, assert: “[T]here is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution.”
Two problems currently exist with the stories being told about schools and the education reform movement—the data do not support claims of “crisis” and NAEP perpetuates the “crisis” myth by design.
Touted as the “Nation’s Report Card,” NAEP developed achievement levels that were designed to hold states accountable for having high standards, and as a result, “proficiency” on NAEP is “aspirational” but not representative of “grade-level proficiency.”
The US is now mired in decades of punitive education legislation (standards and high-stakes testing as well as third-grade retention and VAM-based teacher evaluation) that has not worked because the central claim of “crisis” is simply not supported by the evidence.
Especially in the wake of the devastating impact of Covid on public education, students, and teachers, the Biden Administration has the historic opportunity to change direction in US public education reform.
This open letter, then, is an urgent call to do the following:
- Acknowledge and reject the false narratives of manufactured public education “crises” and media-created education “miracles.”
- Declare accountability-based, punitive reform a failure—despite good intentions—and call for equity-based, supportive reform that forefronts the impact of systemic forces outside and inside our public schools.
- Reform dramatically NAEP testing so that test data better supports learning and instruction instead of driving a false story of education crisis (for example, reform the use of NAEP “proficiency” to represent “age-level proficiency”).
US public education has a long and inexcusable history of political negligence in terms of supporting the most vulnerable children in our society; that includes negligence of vulnerable students in our public education system.
Our children and the country deserve robust and substantive education reform, not false stories of failure and misguided blame and punishment.
Regretfully, the last forty years have been a perpetual cycle of manufactured crisis and punitive policy.
The Biden Administration—notably a rhetorical “friend” of education embodied by Dr. Jill Biden—can and should chose a different story about our schools, our students, and our teachers.
As celebrated author James Baldwin urged: “The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 