Common Core: 2. The Myth of Failing Schools

Federal involvement in public education gained ground in 1979 with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), which enlarged the federal role in education. Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, ED was controversial. Critics saw it as an intrusion into state and local affairs, and Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency on a pledge to dismantle the new department. However, he was not able to fulfill that campaign promise as president. Instead, Reagan appointed a National Commission on Excellence in Education, which, in 1984, published A Nation at Risk.

The publication of the commission report was a seminal event. It triggered an avalanche of federal, state, and local “reform” initiatives and fueled a largely erroneous sense that American schools were failing—a belief that persists to the present day despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, in 1990 the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico was commissioned to document the decline of American education reported in A Nation at Risk. What the scientists found was contradictory data. However, the Sandia Report was suppressed at the time. It eventually found its way into print as “Perspectives on Education in America, An Annotated Briefing, April 1992,” in the May-June 1993 issue of Journal of Educational Research, an academic journal little read by the general public. Thus the myth of failing schools persists.

Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, then president George H.W. Bush had convened an “education summit,” which ironically included no educators, cognitive scientists, or professionals in teaching and learning. The summit was entirely populated by state governors, who met to determine the future course of American education. Out of this and subsequent meetings the “standards-based education reform” movement rooted and grew.

The standards movement gained its next major version in the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. During the 1990s national subject-matter associations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, were commissioned to develop standards for all subject areas and grades. Goals 2000 provided funding to states and communities to develop local curricula based on content and achievement standards set by the various subject-specific organizations. The goals themselves were not intended to be a curriculum.

Authorization for Goals 2000 was withdrawn with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed by President George W. Bush in 2001. Significantly, NCLB required states to develop assessments in basic skills in order to receive federal school funding. This requirement vastly expanded the use of large-scale, high-stakes, standardized tests in public schools across the nation. NCLB thereby also expanded the federal role in public education through testing, annual academic progress reporting, and changes to teacher qualifications and funding.

The Common Core State Standards go a step further toward restricting state and local authority by setting federal standards in place backed by national standardized tests that have yet to be fully developed.