A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform is the title of the 1983 report of American President Ronald Reagan 's National Commission on Excellence in Education . Its publication is considered a landmark event in modern American education history. Among other things, the report contributed to the ever-growing (and still present) sense that American schools are failing miserably, and it touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts.
The Commission consisted of 18 members, drawn from the private sector, government, and education. The chair of the commission was David Pierpont Gardner.
As implied by the title of the report, the Commission's charter responds to Secretary of Education T. H. Bell's observation that the United State's educational system was failing to meet the national need for competitive workforce. Among other things, the charter required the commission to assess the "quality of teaching and learning" at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels, in both the public and private spheres; and to compare "American schools and colleges with those of other advanced nations." The report itself is perhaps best remembered for the ominous language in the opening pages: "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people".
Presidential commissions on education have been relatively common since the The Truman Report in 1947. Other notable groups include President Eisenhower's "Committee on Education Beyond the High School," (1956), President Kennedy's Task Force on Education (1960), and President George W. Bush's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, also known as the the Spellings Commission , which produced "A Test of Leadership" (2006).
The report surveys various studies which point to academic underachievement on national and international scales. For example, the report notes that average SAT scores dropped "over 50 points" in the verbal section and "nearly 40 points" in the mathematics section during the period 1963-1980. Nearly forty percent of 17 year olds tested could not successfully "draw inferences from written material," and "only one-only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps." Referencing tests conducted in the seventies, the study points to unfavorable comparisons with students outside the United States: on "19 academic tests American students were never first or second and, in comparison with other industrialized nations, were last seven times".
In response to these and similar problems, the commission made 38 recommendations, divided across 5 major categories: Content, Standards and Expectations, Time, Teaching, Leadership and Fiscal Support:
A Nation at Risk does not specifically address several of President Reagan's stated policy initiatives for education: "voluntary prayer under school auspices, tax credits for tuition payments and abolition of the department of education".
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article A Nation at Risk..