On a cold and rainy day last February, Bruce Alberts wore a grim expression as he stepped
up to the microphones to make his statement at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.1. The final results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) had just been released, and America's high school seniors had placed near the back of tile pack.
"There is no excuse for this, "President Bill Clinton had already chided." These results are, entirely unacceptable, "admonished the secretary of education. The head of the National Education Association declared U.S. schools to be in a state of crisis. And now Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that he, too, saw in this report "all the elements of an education tragedy."
"Americans have always risen to a crisis," he added. "We see clearly that the future is threatened. 2. Let us act now to heed this important wake-up call." And so, with editorial writers and educators across the country obligingly sounding the alarm, American education lurched yet again into crisis mode.
It is a cyclical ritual, repeated in every decade since the 1940s, observes Gregory William of the University of Toledo. 3. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 set off an orgy of anxiety culminating in Admiral Hyman Rickover's 1963 book American Education, A National Failure, in which he famously predicted that "the Russians will bury us" thanks to their more rigorous science and math courses. 4. Beginning with the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, one blue-ribbon panel after another warned that massive educational failure had ceded the United State's technological lead to Japan and other competitors—a conclusion that proved premature.
5. Although the particulars vary from one education crisis to the next, the episodes are connected by common threads. Each has surged into public discourse on an unrelenting torrent of angst flowing from the educational research profession, William says. Combing through the education literature of the past 30 years, he recently turned up more than 4,000 articles and books in which scholars declared some sort of crisis in the schools—but rarely bothered to spell out what cataclysm was imminent. Each episode has also eaten away at public confidence in schools, which fell 38 percent from 1973 to 1996, according to surveys by the National Opinion Research Center.
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