Two decades after the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its celebrated "A Nation at Risk" report, how much progress has the U.S. made in averting that risk and bringing excellence to its schools? Not much, says the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, one of whose eleven members I am.
At a symposium yesterday in Washington, at which Education Secretary Rod Paige, Senator (and former Education Secretary) Lamar Alexander, and former Excellence Commission staff director Milt Goldberg also spoke, the Task Force issued its new report, accompanied by eleven individually-authored chapters that amplify and document its findings and recommendations.
The Koret Task Force concludes, in the first of ten "findings," that "U.S. education outcomes, measured in many ways, show little improvement since 1970. The trends that alarmed the Excellence Commission have not been reversed."
Why, despite so much energy, good will and money devoted to education reform, has so little progress been made? Did the Excellence Commission misdiagnose the problem? The Koret group says yes, the 1983 panel "failed to confront essential issues of power and control" and underestimated the tenacity of three "powerful forces of inertia" within the education system: "the resistance to change from the organized adult interests of the K-12 education system"; the "'thoughtworld' of the nation's colleges of education"; and the "large number of Americans, particularly in middle-class suburbs, who believe that their schools are basically sound and academically successful." By not foreseeing and grappling with the sources of resistance to its recommendations, the commission issued a much-needed wake-up call to the nation but failed to leverage needed changes in the education system itself.
The Task Force's other nine findings assert that "The U.S. economy has fared well during the past two decades not because of the strong performance of its K-12 system, but because of a host of coping and compensating mechanisms...We've made progress in narrowing resource gaps...but the achievement gaps that vex us remain nearly as wide as ever....The preponderance of school reform efforts since A Nation at Risk has concentrated on augmenting the system's resources, widening its services, and tightening its regulation of school practices....Higher-quality teachers are key...but the proper gauge to measure that quality has nothing to do with paper credentials or more resources and everything to do with classroom effectiveness....Bold reform attempts have been implemented in limited and piecemeal fashion, despite their potential to improve student learning....Standards-based reform has not achieved its full potential. Though promising, it is hard to get right....Choice-based reforms have not had a fair test....Americans need better, more timely information about student performance....We need a thoroughgoing reform of elementary and middle schooling."
When it turns to recommendations, the Koret Task Force offers three big strategies - accountability, choice and transparency - and elaborates these in 12 specific suggestions.
To obtain a copy of either the short (58-page) version of the Task Force Report or the longer (378-page) volume that includes the back-up chapters, visit the Hoover Institution Press web site at http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/osof.html. Additionally, the spring 2003 issue of Education Next, also issued yesterday, contains an abbreviated form of the Koret report and both condensed versions of some back-up chapters, as well as commentaries by Milt Goldberg, Lisa Graham Keegan, Patricia Albjerg Graham and former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt. You can find Education Next online at http://www.educationnext.org or seek a copy at your nearest newsstand.
