Article #11 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Demise of the Promising Standards Movement, 1983-2008

In 1983 the United States Commission on Excellence in Education, having been charged by U. S. Secretary of Education T. H. Bell to assess the state of public education, revealed that state to be so abysmal as to entitle the document summarizing the Commission's findings, A Nation at Risk.

The Commision found teaching quality highly variable from school district to school district and frequently poor;  curriculum typically ill-articulated from grade to grade;  assigning of grades wildly inconsistent and often unreflective of achievement levels;  issuance of diplomas to a substantial proportion of students who lacked basic skills and in many cases were fuctionally illiterate;  and a cluster of conditions in urban districts that rendered public education of students, especially nonwhite, particularly.ineffective and discriminatory.

The report engendered a number of highly disparate, contradictory responses >>>>>

>>>>>   Those who misleadingly appropriated the appellation, "progressive," doubled down on the approach responsible for putting the nation at risk, arguing for more schools  in which curriculum was flexible, assessments by portfolio and demonstration, and classrooms presided over by teachers in the role of project guides, rather than bearers of knowledge.

>>>>>  Some, identifying as conservative and generally distrustful of government, argued for the design and implemenration of voucher systems that would allow students across economic class to attend private schools of their selection.

>>>>>  Others advocated for charter schools, publicly funded schools started and managed by citizens (community members, parents, students, teachers) so as to meet certain requirements but to gain exemption from many regulations.

>>>>>  And then there were those who wanted to address the problems identified in >A Nation at Risk< directly, by establishing grade by grade standards, objective assessments for determining student skill levels with data disaggregated by income and ethnicity, and consequences for schools in which students of various demographic descriptors failed to meet grade level standards.

Voucher advocates never got very far with their proposals.  Here and there putative progressives established new schools, in which students mostly did not demonstrate grade level skills across income and ethnicity.  Charter schools were launched.in Minnesota in 1991, over time evidencing even lower student achievement levels than those witnessed in conventional public schools.  

The standards movement gained great momentum throughout the 1990s and in the United States Congress gained legislative manifestation in the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), a bipartisan initiative led by Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner.

This promising legislation mandated that states establish objectively measurable grade level standards, with appropriate assessments, and specifying consequences for schools in which students identified according to disaggregated data did not meet standards.  

State systems went into effect beginning in 2002 and for a half-decade offered great promise until rendered moribund by forces of both the political left and the political right by the year 2008.