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>> P O I N T O F V I E W
A Nation at Risk
And the Blind Men
When A Nation at Risk appeared,
everyone saw school reform through
a lens of preconceived ideas about
teaching and learning.
BY SALLY BLAKE
NCE upon a time, there lived
six blind men in a faraway
country. They were revered as
leaders, and one day the villagers said to them, “We need
education reform in this land.”
The six men, having no idea
what this “education reform”
was, decided to set about finding out. All of them went
to where the reform lived, grabbed hold of a portion,
and described what seemed most salient about it.
“Lo, education reform is a way to catch the public’s attention and help us get elected,” said the man
who wanted to further his political agenda.
“No! Education reform means educating citizens to
support democratic values,” said the man who lived
on a $3-million houseboat.
“Oh, no! It means all students must learn basic skills
and how to follow directions,” said the man who owned
the factories.
“Not at all,” said the fourth man, a strong believer
in testing. “It is a chance to test children at least twice
a year, and the more tests the better. We can finally
hold teachers accountable.”
O
■ SALLY BLAKE is an associate professor in the Department of Instruction and Curriculum Leadership and the research coordinator
for the Barbara K. Lipman Early Childhood School and Research
Institute at the University of Memphis.
“No! It is an opportunity to garner some state revenue by selling tests for teachers and students,” said
the fifth man, who was a test-maker.
“You’re all wrong! It is a way to make sure all children learn what they need to know. It will create academic equality,” said the sixth man, who was an academician.
Then they began to argue about education reform,
and every one of them insisted that he was right. They
were growing agitated, when a wise man was passing by
and heard the commotion. When he had learned the
cause of their troubles, the wise man calmly explained,
“All of you are right, and all of you are wrong.”
THE PARADOXES IN EDUCATION
Like the six blind men, every part of the land of education reacted differently to A Nation at Risk. And during the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, that report spawned
an outpouring of other reports on various aspects of
education. Some saw the problem as “bad teachers,”
which immediately raised the question of “bad schools
of education” where they were trained. Today, a similar perception is at least partly responsible for the surge
in alternative teacher certification programs that has
been taking place over the past 25 years.
Other observers — even some members of the panel that wrote A Nation at Risk — saw the problem as
low standards. Their subsequent labors led to the development of what came to be known as the standards
movement — a broad enough term to encompass the
efforts of the individual disciplines to set out a body of
knowledge and skills in each field along with the efforts of those who pushed for high school graduation
exams, which are now facts of life in the majority of
states. With regard to the disciplinary standards, Diane
Ravitch said in a 2006 interview, “When they [the standards documents] are overwhelming in bulk, they can’t
be taken seriously. Then they are just a wish list.” The
jury is still out on the high school graduation tests, though
concerned observers such as Anne Wheelock in Massachusetts have been collecting and analyzing data on
school dropouts before ninth grade.1
Nor was higher education exempt from criticism in
A Nation at Risk, though, as an institution, it has proved
less willing to go along with the various proposals that
spun off from the original report than has K-12 education. A Nation at Risk cautioned against grade inflation and recommended that four-year colleges “raise
admissions standards” and that students be tested at
major transition points, including movement from high
school to college or work.
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But apparently there were aspects of A Nation at
Risk that either no one noticed or that proved unable
to hold the attention of reformers. The report called attention to the need to “meet the needs of key groups
of students such as the gifted and talented, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, minority and language minority students, and the handicapped.”2 But that plan
ran off the rails soon after the standards movement began
to pick up steam. And No Child Left Behind (NCLB),
perhaps the most recent of the aftershocks of A Nation
at Risk, has made efforts to meet children’s special needs
that much more difficult.
The largest numbers of children failing the assessments required by NCLB, of course, are minority children from lower socioeconomic status homes. The number of these children labeled as special education has
increased, their schools are hard to staff and have high
attrition rates for teachers and students, and the achievement gap between socioeconomic groups is still painfully evident.
Thomas Jefferson summarized the reasons we must
continue to search for answers to education’s problems:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand
with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes
more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are
made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions
change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must
advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well
require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when
a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen
of their barbarous ancestors.3
We must ask ourselves if the education reforms that
followed A Nation at Risk have furthered the progress
of the human mind or moved us in the opposite direction. The reforms coming from A Nation at Risk
have seemed less concerned with producing generations of critical or creative thinkers than with satisfying a range of competing agendas. If we develop education systems that produce independent thinkers, not
parrots of facts and ideas, we should be better prepared
as a nation to confront an unknown future.
1. Diane Ravitch, “Reconsidering National Standards, Curricula, and
Tests: A Talk with Diane Ravitch,” Education Week Chats, Lynn Olson,
moderator, 18 January 2006. Some recent information on dropouts in
Massachusetts as well as contact information for Anne Wheelock can be
found at www.massparents.org/news/2005/mass_dropout_rates_rise.htm.
2. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk:
The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983), p. 32.
K
3. Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1810.
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Sally Blake, A Nation at Risk and the Blind Men, Phi Delta Kappan,
Vol. 89, No. 08, April 2008, pp. 601-602.
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