P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
“Lack of support for early years language and communication development is leading to a “literacy crisis” that could be costing the economy £830m for each school year group, according to new research,” write Ella Creamer in The Guardian.
The report cited is a February 2024 analysis and heralds another round of reading crisis in the UK.
This is quite interesting considering that in 2006, the UK implemented a phonics-centered reform agenda that has been documented to have been robustly practiced, notably that all students have received systematic phonics in the UK for almost two decades:
Prior to 2006 the teaching of reading in most classrooms in England is best described as balanced instruction, in which some phonics teaching has always been part of the teaching of reading typically for children in the infant years (aged five to seven) although not necessarily ‘systematic phonics’ instruction…. However in 2006 the Rose Report recommended that there should be even more emphasis on phonics teaching….
This was followed by the increased emphasis on discrete teaching of phonics recommended by the Rose Report and the PNS from 2006 onwards. Further intensification of synthetic phonics teaching was seen in England’s national curriculum of 2014, along with a range of other measures to ensure teacher compliance with the prescribed method of teaching reading, including the use of the PSC; the vetting of phonics teaching schemes; and the use of the inspectorate to focus on outcomes in statutory reading assessments as a prime focus in school inspections.
Also of note, that research in 2022 revealed, once again, these reforms were misguided and ineffective. The researchers concluded, calling for a more balanced approach:
In addition to the importance of contextualised reading teaching as an evidence-based orientation to the teaching of reading we hypothesise the following pedagogical features that are likely to be effective. Phonics teaching is most likely to be effective for children aged five to six. Phonics teaching with children younger than this is not likely to be effective. A focus on whole texts and reading for meaning, to contextualise the teaching of other skills and knowledge, should drive pedagogy. Classroom teachers using their professional judgement to ensure coherence of the approach to teaching phonics and reading with other relevant teaching in their classroom is most likely to be effective. Insistence on particular schemes/ basals, scripted lessons, and other inflexible approaches is unlikely to be optimal. Well-trained classroom assistants, working in collaboration with their class teachers, could be a very important contribution to children’s reading development.
More evidence from the UK shows that reducing reading instruction to systematic phonics ignores both the science of reading instruction and the realities of human development. The mandatory phonics checks in the UK show that achievement correlates strongly with birth month, not instruction and certainly not resulting in the sort of reading achievement that avoids another reading war:
The “science of reading” movement in the US is misguided and costly, mostly benefitting commercial interests repackaging reading programs and materials emphasizing phonics.
States are rushing to mimic practices that have already failed in the UK. Our students and teachers deserve better.
Similar to A Nation at Risk and a core part of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a bi-partisan committee formed under Bill Clinton and then elevated under George W. Bush.
Joanne Yatvin, a panel member who issued a Minority Report, wrote in Education Week in 2003, warning that the NRP’s conclusions would be misrepresented, misused, and thus misunderstood.
Yatvin was right.
And 15 years later, Emily Hanford—among dozens of journalists—continued to prove Yatvin correct:
The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.
In 2024, as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement continues to steamroll state reading legislation, journalists persist in misrepresenting the panel’s findings as well as ignoring that the NRP is over two decades old, which means reading science has moved well beyond what the panel claimed to find.
Often ignored, panel members admitted the NRP was underfunded and understaffed, resulting in the panel’s overview of reading research was greatly limited to only a narrow type of published research.
Further, despite the Urban Legends of the findings repeated by Hanford and other journalists, the NRP’s conclusions are not what has been claimed.
First, Tim Shanahan, a panel member, admitted that the report did little to support classroom practice.
But more importantly, the actual findings of the panel in no way support the media claims about what research says about teaching reading, the role of phonics instruction, or the evidence on whole language.
Diane Stephens, University of South Carolina emeritus professor, provides an excellent summary of the findings:
Phonemic Awareness: PA is a “means rather than an end”; doesn’t increase comprehension; only one of many elements needed to read independently.
Phonics: Minimal value in kindergarten; no conclusion about phonics beyond grade 1 for “normally developing readers”; systematic phonics instruction in grades 2-6 with struggling readers has a weak impact on reading text and spelling; systematic phonics instruction has a positive effect in grade 1 on reading (pronouncing) real and nonsense words but not comprehension; at-risk students benefit from whole language instruction, Reading Recovery, and direct instruction.
Fluency: The ability of students to make sense of text grammatically and with understanding of punctuation.
Vocabulary: Vocabulary is acquired many ways by readers; number of words acquired cannot be accomplished through direct instruction. About 1/3 of vocabulary learning in grades 3 – 8 linked to reading.
Comprehension: Weak evidence in report on comprehension. Emphasizes need for SBRR (scientifically based reading research) and “putting teachers in positions where their minds are the most valued educational resource.”
As many scholars have noted (see below), the NRP found that systematic phonics and whole language were about equally effective, but the key here is that phonics instruction was found to be effective for pronunciation, not comprehension, and only in grade 1.
In short, the NRP was never a definitive overview of reading science (or a confirmation about teaching systematic phonics to all students), and now that we are 20-plus years past the report, citing the NRP should be limited to historical references, not evidence of the current state of reading science.
I recommend the following to understand fully the NRP:
Shanahan, T. (2003, April). Research-based reading instruction: Myths about the National Reading Panel report. The Reading Teacher, 56(7), 646-655.
Bowers, J.S. (2020).Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y
Collet, V.S., Penaflorida, J., French, S., Allred, J., Greiner, A., & Chen, J. (2021). Red flags, red herrings, and common ground: An expert study in response to state reading policy. Educational Considerations, 47(1). https://doi.org/10.4148/0146-9282.2241
Garan, E.M. (2001, March). Beyond smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(7), 500-506. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170108200705
Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119–S130. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341
Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the National Reading Panel. The Phi Delta Kappan,83(5), 364-369
“Schooling in the United States is revered as a societal foundation for possibility, empowerment, and social mobility,” explain Rios, Matthews, Zentell, and Kogut, adding, “However, US schooling systems also serve as institutions foundationally designed for and historically entrenched in the service of white, monolingual, middle- and upper-class populations.”
Further, they argue, “Scholars advocate for acknowledging students’ cultures as assets and incorporating them in teaching, a praxis known as culturally relevant pedagogy.”
The SOR movement and resulting legislation fits into the larger accountability education reform movement that is grounded in essentialism and conservative ideology.
Here, I offer a close reading of Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy by Ian Cushing as a powerful entry point to understanding how SOR reading reform is conservative ideology that ultimately harms children’s linguistic development and thus the development of Self.
Cushing frames his examination in two points: first, that literacy instruction (specifically in this piece, oracy) is grounded in deficit ideology, adding, “The second is that the oracy agenda’s vision for social justice is flawed in how it relies on a theory of change where marginalised children can experience equality and upward mobility by making tweaks to their language, and that oracy provides the compensatory tool to do so.”
In other words, much of literacy instruction is aimed at “fixing” children in the context of a social norm while ignoring social inequities, such as those norms themselves.
And thus, “Marginalised children routinely experience the hostile policing of their language and public humiliation for their purported inability to speak correctly.”
The essential conservative ideology behind deficit views of language invert reform agendas:
Put another way, I argue that England’s oracy agenda interprets structural inequality as a ‘linguistic problem requiring linguistic solutions, rather than as a politico-economic problem requiring politico-economic solutions’ (Rosa, 2016, p. 165). Whilst the apparent progressivism of oracy may appear to some to be a liberatory means to afford marginalised children greater opportunities, I show here that it is rooted in deficit-based assumptions about language which overdetermine marginalised children as linguistically inferior and blames them for their own struggles.
A progressive or critical alternative to conservative ideology grounding reform, then, includes this recognition: “Social justice is a long-term project which will only be ever achieved when our efforts are on structural transformations as opposed to tweaking individual behaviours (Gandolfi & Mills, 2023; Kaba, 2021; Picower, 2012).”
However, similar to here in the US, “[S]implistic notions of social justice … have long characterised mainstream education policy, especially in England. … [D]ominant conceptualisations of social justice in education are ones rooted in individualised explanations of inequality, and result in individualised and reductive solutions,” for example, the SOR movement and legislation focusing on reforming teacher practice and raising student reading proficiency scores.
Notable is how progressive veneers in reform hide conservative ideology:
[T]he phrase social justice has been co-opted by the political right since the 1980s, producing a narrative reliant on individual change rather than state responsibility. The Labour Party has reproduced these same logics in relation to oracy and social justice (e.g. Hardy, 2020; The Labour Party, 2023; Starmer, 2023). Whilst my critique is of a bipartisan narrative, then, of particular concern here are the social justice logics emerging from the left, particularly academics and charities who position themselves as liberally progressive.
[D]eficit and dichotomous framings … essentialise marginalised children as linguistically impoverished and in need of remediation.
Central to understanding the political nature of reform is to acknowledge the political and ideological nature of language and language acquisition—including the ideological bias in the “word gap” narrative:
Any description of language is ideological, and these ideologies are products of specific sociopolitical contexts. … These deficit perspectives continued into the twenty-first century in terms of the ‘word gap’ (Hart & Risley, 1995), blaming low academic performance on irresponsible parenting and broken homes rather than the structural inequalities within wider society (Valencia, 2010). Whilst the terminology used to represent marginalised communities as displaying linguistic deficiencies has shifted over time, the underlying logics remain the same. Yet oracy has, for the most part, evaded academic scrutiny and been positioned as a progressive linguistic concept which stands in opposition to deficit thinking.
Deficit perspectives of language and children include overlapping aspects of both classism and racism as well as ableism, reflecting normative biases framed as individual deficits to be overcome through policy:
These representations align with Bereiter and Engelmann’s depictions of working-class African American children in the 1960s, who were deemed to be ‘not simply deficient in their use of words; they are deficient in their repertoire of concepts’, and thus incapable of abstract thought (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966, p. 127)….
These ableist labels are reflective of a long history of academic scholarship which perceives non-speech languages and their users as disordered and primitive (see Henner & Robinson, 2023). In similar ways to other deficit perspectives of the time and overlooking the structural inequalities marginalised children experience, Wilkinson poses that it is inadequate linguistic abilities which put such children at a disadvantage in school, and that these inadequacies act as an impediment to the interactions required for the middle-class conditions of school….
These framings tie together race, class, and dis/ability in producing discourses of deficiency which continue to circulate in contemporary policy.
This leads to a key recognition about literacy policy that is fundamentally conservative, normative, and deficit-driven:
The oracy for social justice narrative is, then, a bipartisan one, and one entirely in line with recent, mainstream political conceptualisations of social justice which focus on individualised remediation rather than endemic structures of inequality which require radical transformation….
When children are framed as suffering from gaps in their language, logics follow that they require interventions to close them, which often legitimises language prescription and policing under the purportedly progressive aims of oracy.
Ultimately, then: “[D]eficit perspectives frame marginalised children as part of an ‘at-risk’ discourse, in which struggling families are both blamed for their own educational failures and responsible for addressing them.”
Education and literacy reform, regardless of the nation, tends to focus on “fixing” children or teachers, and that inidividual gaze is a distraction from addressing systemic causes of the so-called “gaps” in the performances of those students or teachers in formal schooling.
Centering the concept of literacy “gaps” and calling for closing those gaps are offering cures equal to or greater than the disease: “[O]ften framed as a progressive project, then, I have shown here how it has long relied on academic scholarship rooted in deficit, dichotomous, and anti-Black ideologies about language and supposed gaps. This has surfaced without any critical interrogation of language gap ideologies, despite the extensive body of scholarship which has debunked and rejected them (e.g. Aggarwal, 2016, Avineri et al., 2015, Cushing, 2023b, García & Otheguy, 2017, Johnson & Johnson, 2021).”
These failures are, again, bipartisan: “[B]oth sides rely on normative notions of language which rely on deficit and dichotomous framings.” And thus, “we should all be suspicious of bipartisan narratives which position oracy as a pragmatic tool for structural change.”
Cushing concludes in a way that is equally relevant to education and reading reform in the US: “Genuine social justice efforts require transformative methodologies which target the root causes of injustices and reimagine the societies which our schools are part of, generating solutions which modify systems as opposed to individuals.”
Sources
Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Amanda Rigell, Arianna Banack, Amy Maples, Judson Laughter, Amy Broemmel, Nora Vines & Jennifer Jordan (2022) Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54:6, 852-870, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803
Rios, A., Matthews, S. D., Zentell, S. & Kogut, A. (2024). More being, different doing: Illuminating examples of culturally relevant literacy teaching. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 67, 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1329
“The 2022 NAEP results show that the average reading score for fourth graders is lower than it has been in over 20 years. For eighth and twelfth graders, average scores are at about a 30-year low,” states Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his new literacy report, adding, “The 2022 NAEP LongTerm Trend assessment for nine-year-old students showed average reading scores not seen since 1999.”
Cassidy’s alert about a reading crisis fits into dozens and dozens of media articles announcing crises and failures among students, teachers, and public schools all across the US. Typical of that journalism was Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a year ago:
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.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
As I have noted, education and reading crises have simply been a fact of US narratives since A Nation at Risk. But as I have also been detailing, these claims are misleading and manufactured.
Based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:
This analysis demonstrates that the current reading crisis is manufactured, exclusively rhetorical and ideological, generating profit for media, politicians, and commercial publishers.
In short, the manufactured crises are distractions from the other contrarian truth about education as highlighted in the analysis from NPE:
This educational grading from NPE is unique because it doesn’t grade students, teachers, or public school, but holds political leadership accountable for supporting universal public education and democracy. The standards for these grades include the following:
Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.
These two examples come from contrasting ideologies, yet they offer contrarian truths about public schools and student achievement that would better serve how we talk about schools and student achievement as well as how we seek ways in which to reform those schools in order to better serve those students and our democracy.
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
Accordingly, when policymakers explore new guidelines, they would be wise to do the following:
• Be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy, acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.
• Attend to known influences on measurable student reading achievement, including the socioeconomics of communities, schools, and homes; teacher expertise and autonomy; and teaching and learning conditions.
• Recognize student-centered as an important research-supported guiding principle but also acknowledge the reality that translating such research-based principles into classroom practice is always challenging.
• Shift new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (“one-size-fits-all” approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.
In rethinking past efforts and undertaking new reforms, policymakers should additionally move beyond the ineffective cycles demonstrated during earlier debates and reforms, avoid ing specific mandates and instead providing teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs. Therefore, state policymakers should do the following:
• End narrowly prescriptive non-research-based policies and programs such as:
o Grade retention based on reading performance. o High-stakes reading testing at Grade 3. o Mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach. o A “one-size-fits-all” approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.
• Form state reading panels, consisting of classroom teachers, researchers, and other literacy experts. Panels would support teachers by serving in an advisory role for teacher education, teacher professional development, and classroom practice. They would develop and maintain resources in best practice and up-to-date reading and literacy research.
On a more local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:
• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.
• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.
U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) has released a report on literacy that opens with yet another example of misrepresenting NAEP reading scores to manufacture a reading crisis for political gain: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”
The report is an embarrassing recycling of the media misinformation campaign about reading in the US.
In fact, most of the footnotes cite news articles (including the Washington Times, a conservative outlet that lacks credibility) and conservative think tanks (ExcelinEd, Fordham). [1]
Notably missing are citations to scientific research on reading or credible analyses of NAEP data.
Responses are needed and can be sent to Literacy@help.senate.gov by April 5, 2024.
Good intentions are not enough and government policy on education has done more harm than good since A Nation at Risk. We can do better, and we should. But we must start with accurate claims and credible solutions.
A school for students with dyslexia continues to stay open despite two F grades from the BESE, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The Louisiana Key Academy is run by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and his wife, Laura. Both are physicians. Neither are specialists in reading disorders, although they have a child with dyslexia.
Advances and Missed Opportunities in the Development of the 2026 NAEP Reading Framework, Forzani, et al. (2022)
Some misinformation about education starts with journalists (even at the biggest of media outlets).
“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,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.
Kristof’s piece in 2023 can be traced back to a similar claim by Emily Hanford in 2018: “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s,” including a surprisingly ineffective graphic:
Student reading proficiency grounded in misrepresenting or misunderstanding NAEP is likely one of the most complicated aspects of education debate and reform.
In media and political rhetoric, first, the terms “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading” are commonly jumbled and used inappropriately as synonyms.
Achievement levels such as “basic” and “proficient,” used in NAEP for reading, are misleading and complicated for most people not familiar with technical terminology.
NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level (although even that claim is problematic since no standard exists in the US for “proficient” or “grade level”), and “proficient” on NAEP is high:
Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf
NAEP testing and data are normative, measuring what a general population is achieving (not individual students), and as noted above, NAEP “proficient” is aspirational.
Hanford’s and Kristof’s misinformation, then, is a combination of blurring NAEP achievement levels with grade level reading achievement and manufacturing a reading crisis with that misinformation.
Ironically, NAEP grade 4 reading scores for a decade show that 2/3 of students are reading at or above grade level, the inverse of the false crisis claims of the media:
The misinformation about reading proficiency and NAEP help perpetuate misinformation about educational crisis, but it also masks the more complicated truths: the US has no standard metric for assessing the national reading achievement of students, and focusing on manufactured reading crises distracts reformers from addressing what we can identify—inequitable access to reading proficiency among minoritized and marginalized populations of students.
I recommend the following to understand the essential failure of using NAEP to manufacture a crisis around reading proficiency in the US:
Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf
Some misinformation about education starts with politicians (even the biggest of politicians).
“And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education,” implored Ronald Reagan as he established his goals for the committee charged with producing A Nation at Risk (1983). Reagan sought to shift the public’s support from public schools to school choice as well as, in his misguided words, return prayer to schools.
A Nation at Risk represents two important aspects of US education reform.
First, as noted by several scholars and committee members, the charge of the committee was primarily about partisan politics and not about substantive education reform.
Second, the report established the manufactured “crisis,” which is eagerly perpetuated by mainstream media, as the basis for decades of accountability-based reform that has resulted in an unproductive cycle of crisis/reform that never accomplishes any effective change for students, teachers, public education, or democratic society.
The narrative created by A Nation at Risk has none the less some enduring elements that are uncritically supported by mainstream media (complicit in themisinformation):
Educational failure is grounded in the educational system itself, and thus, education reform has been in-school-only reform policies.
Identifying systemic societal, community, and home influences on measurable student learning is rejected as using poverty/inequity as an “excuse.”
Teachers are simultaneously the most important factor in education and the agents of failure due to poor training and/or low expectations for marginalized student populations.
The rhetoric is grounded in crisis/miracle binary and the primary evidence for those claims are standardized tests (mostly state-level accountability testing and NAEP).
Policies tend to be one-size-fits all solutions to overstated and unsupported problems.
Edling (2015) has identified similar patterns grounded in media rhetoric resulting in education policy internationally:
• Viewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis
• Taking the role as a spokesperson for teachers and on behalf of the field of education
• Excluding the knowledge and experiences of teacher(s), educators and/or educational researchers in the public press
• Simplifying the notion of being a good teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity.
The template established by A Nation at Risk can bee seen in every reform movement since the 1980s, first at the state level and then at the national level with No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
From the standards and testing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s to the charter schools and value-added methods for teacher evaluation under Obama and to today’s “science of reading” (SOR) movement, the essential elements noted above characterize the obsession in the US with crisis/reform in education with no real change ever accomplished.
Ironically, neither the claims of educational crisis nor the reforms proposed throughout the past five decades have been grounded in credible evidence.
A Nation at Risk established the manufactured crisis approach to education reform, which has created only political and market profits for those driving the crisis rhetoric and the reforms.
I recommend the following to understand the essential failure of A Nation at Risk as a template for crisis/education reform in the US:
