Ahead of its time

Twenty-five years after “A Nation at Risk” warned about the “rising tide of mediocrity” in U.S. public schools, the landmark federal report seems strangely prophetic -- and eerily descriptive of some of Los Angeles’ woes today. Though it was based on faulty data and jumped to largely the wrong conclusions, time has caught up with the report.

“A Nation at Risk” caught the attention of the nation when it said that SAT scores were dropping. Trouble is, that wasn’t true -- they only appeared to be falling because a wider pool of students began considering college and thus taking the test. Some other standardized test scores were rising, and some were stable. The report’s doomsday tone about how poor education would stifle the economy appeared laughable 15 years later as the country prospered.

Yet by the 1990s, scholastic achievement was stagnating, while grade inflation and social promotion were producing high school graduates with skimpy skills. In more recent years, nations that bolstered their school systems while maintaining a low-cost labor force have presented a potent economic threat. As a nation, we have finally become more aware that poor and minority students too often are stuck in overcrowded, physically deteriorating campuses with undertrained teachers.

“A Nation at Risk” was largely a gambit by the Reagan administration to frame the education debate in Cold War terms: The communists would prevail if this nation didn’t get tough on its schools. Although educators blame the report for creating an obsession with standardized testing, they also owe it a debt of gratitude. President Reagan’s idea of education reform was to privatize schools through vouchers and tax credits, abolish the Department of Education and slash federal funding. The report made it clear that the nation needed to put more thought and support into its public schools.

The road in that direction has been slow and slippery under the clumsily framed No Child Left Behind Act. The authors of the 1983 report would have decried the school reform act’s rigidity and narrow focus, which have pushed schools toward achieving minimum competency rather than broad intellectual development. Charter schools have interpreted the Reagan-era report more cannily, using its recommendations for longer school hours, merit-based teacher pay and a more challenging curriculum. The results, notably here in Los Angeles, have been encouraging.

As policymakers here and elsewhere stumble over school reform, they might want to re-read the quarter-century-old report. Oddly, it provides a more useful blueprint today than it did in its own time.