Twenty years after the landmark report A Nation at Risk, American K–12 education remains mired in mediocrity and will require enormous changes "at its core" in order to become more effective, according to a new report by a task force on U.S. education.
Since the 1983 report, which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity," public education has not risen to the challenges set forth in A Nation at Risk.
The time has come to institute a new system based on the principles of accountability, transparency, and choice, according to the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education at the Hoover Institution.
"A Nation at Risk provided the nation with a much-needed wake-up call, but its recommendations proved too timid to catalyze great leaps in educational performance," said Harvard political scientist (and Koret Task Force member) Paul Peterson, who edited the new volume Our Schools and Our Future… Are We Still at Risk? The book is published by Hoover Institution Press.
With the approach of A Nation at Risk's 20th anniversary, Hoover's Koret Task Force on K–12 Education came together to study the nation's response to the challenge laid down in 1983.
In addition to Peterson, members of the task force are John E. Chubb, Williamson M. Evers, Chester E. Finn Jr., Eric A. Hanushek, Paul T. Hill, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Caroline Hoxby, Terry M. Moe, Diane Ravitch, and Herbert J. Walberg.
"The Task Force not only offers an assessment of the past 20 years, but also brings its intellectual capital to bear on the entire issue," said Hoover director John Raisian. "The Task Force endorses the emphasis placed on greater accountability and transparency in American education, as contained in No Child Left Behind.
It also urges that accountability laws be supplemented to give parents greater choice among schools. These are serious and remarkable findings and recommendations."
The 11-member task force of nationally known scholars found that few of the recommendations made by the National Commission on Excellence in Education report were properly implemented.
And, despite many earnest reform efforts and steadily-climbing school expenditures, there is little evidence that students are learning more.
A Nation at Risk called for higher standards for teachers as well as students. It also urged that more time be spent on learning. Yet the Koret Task Force finds that the situation has actually worsened over the past twenty years:
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The share of teachers with a master's degree in a subject area (rather than education) has fallen, from 17 percent in 1982 to 5 percent now.
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Teachers with a B.A. in a subject area fell from 28 percent to 23 percent.
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The school year is about seven days shorter today than it was in the early 1970s.
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Students do no more homework today than they did in 1982—less than an hour a day.
As a result, the Koret Task Force points out student achievement has remained mostly flat for the past several decades.
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The combined math and verbal scores of students on the SAT remain well below their 1970 levels. Though gains have been made in math since 1982, verbal scores have never recovered from the lows they reached in the early 1980s.
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Science scores of 17-year-olds taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress remain below levels reached in 1970, and their math and reading scores have hardly budged.
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On international tests of math and science, the U.S. remains roughly at the international average—right where it was in 1970, and still trails high-flyers such as Japan, Korea, and the Netherlands.
Gains have been negligible, the Task Force says, despite massive increases in resources poured into the country's schools.
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Per pupil expenditures climbed from about $5,700 in 1982 to $9,300 in 2000.
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Student-teacher ratios fell from 19 students in 1982 to 17 students in 1999. During that period, the average elementary-school class dropped from 23 to 21 students, while the average secondary school classroom fell from 23 to 19 students.
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Teacher salaries rose from approximately $19,000 per year to $35,000 a year in 2000, keeping pace with increases in the salaries of other workers. Meanwhile, teacher benefits increased at a faster rate than those in other fields.
The Hoover/Koret scholars point out that the annual cost to the nation of the educational stagnation of the past 20 years is enormous. Task Force member Eric Hanushek estimates that it exceeds $450 billion, enough to cover the entire cost of our public elementary and secondary education system. He adds that the economic growth that the U.S. has enjoyed in recent decades cannot be explained by any improvement in the quality of our K–12 educational system. Indeed, even more growth could have been enjoyed had the nation's schools effectively carried out the mandate given to them in A Nation at Risk.
According to the Koret Task Force, the authors of A Nation at Risk did not envision the resistance their recommendations would face from teacher unions, education schools, and other interests closely associated with K–12 education. As a result, many of the reforms they called for were never implemented.
The Excellence Commission sought to work within the existing system, proposing reforms that states and school districts could act upon immediately—and trusted them to do so.
"We now know," the Task Force writes, "that this was unrealistic, that the Commission failed to confront essential issues of power and control."
The Koret Task Force does not repeat that mistake in its new report. It notes, for example, the key role that education choice plays in introducing competition into the K–12 public system and thus encouraging innovation and improvement. In the end, no regulation is as effective as the ability of parents to vote with their feet—to leave a school that is failing at its basic mission.
