Print |
E-mail to a friend
SPECIAL REPORTS
1983 report predicted education shortfalls
HUNTINGTON -- If you think you've heard the current concerns over American education before, it's because you have.
The 1983 release of the government-commissioned "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" detailed deficiencies in the United States education system.
The commission responsible for that report also predicted that unless policy makers and education leaders took action, they would certainly be scrambling to react as countries once considered below par would eventually catch up.
|
Click here for the "Nation at Risk" report.
|
"The world is indeed one global village. We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops. America's position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer."
The recommendations made by that committee are many of the same things the educational system is only now working to implement, such as increasing graduation requirements, adding more rigor and higher standards to the curriculum, more time devoted to learning the basics and giving teachers more preparation time and better pay.
The high school graduation requirements in West Virginia only recently reached the level recommended in "A Nation at Risk." And only in recent years have states realized students were not being held to the same academic standard that many foreign countries do.
Some have criticized "A Nation at Risk" for wrongly labeling the nation's schools as failing, arguing that the commission drew conclusions without taking into account such factors as a changing population and the impact of other national institutions on learning.
Others have decried what they call the lack of progress.
A project called Strong American Schools issued a report this year assessing the progress toward meeting the recommendations from the Nation at Risk report and found little has been done in key areas. Strong American Schools is described as a nonpartisan campaign supported by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Its report gave the nation an "A" in raising high school graduation requirements over the past quarter-century. But it issued failing ratings for making grades indicators of actual learning, significantly expanding students' learning time by extending the hours of the school day and/or increasing the number of school days in a school year, and making teaching salaries performance-based and market-sensitive. It gave a "C" mark for the development of nationwide tests that signal students' readiness for the next stage of learning.
Cabell County Superintendent William Smith said West Virginia has not been slow in effecting change. He said it just takes time for change to happen throughout the system.
"Just as with students, it takes time to learn," Smith said. "It will also take time for the learning community to understand and adapt to the needs of the new century. How this will all play out by mid-century will certainly be beyond our scope of imagination and prediction just as history has borne out through the philosophers of the early 20th century. It will be fascinating to look back on this time in 2050 to see how we have marked the world stage."
The 1983 report recognized that knowledge, information and intelligence were becoming the "new raw materials of international commerce."
"If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all-- old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority," the report states. "Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the information age we are entering."
Web extra
Go to herald-dispatch.com, click on this story and look for the links to:
- "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform," a report on American education from 1983.
- "A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still At Risk," a report by the Strong American Schools project.
