Excerpted from April 2003 issue of Phi Delta Kappan; the entire article can be found online at: www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0304bra.htm.

APRIL FOOLISHNESS:
   20th Anniversary of A Nation at Risk

A Nation at Risk famously declared a crisis in American education. Even today,
20 years after the report's release, we cling to its message, which Mr. Bracey
shows to be as flawed as it was compelling.

By Gerald Bracey, © 2003

TWENTY YEARS ago this month, James Baker, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, and Mike Deaver, Reagan's close advisor, defeated Attorney General Ed Meese in a battle of White House insiders. Over Meese's strong objections, they persuaded President Reagan to accept A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell had convened the commission. In his memoir, The Thirteenth Man, Bell recalled that he had sought a "Sputnik-type occurrence" that would dramatize all the "constant complaints about education and its effectiveness" that he kept hearing. Unable to produce such an event, Bell settled for a booklet with 36 pages of text and 29 pages of appendices about who had testified before the commission or who had presented it with a paper.
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    Meese and his fellow conservatives hated A Nation at Risk because it did not address any of the items on President Reagan's education agenda: vouchers, tuition tax credits, restoring school prayer, and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Baker called those issues "extraneous and irrelevant." He and the moderates on the White House staff thought the report contained a lot of good stuff to campaign on.[1]
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    The President accepted the report, but his speech acknowledging it largely ignored the report's content and simply reiterated his own agenda. According to Bell, the speech was virtually identical to the draft of a Reagan speech that he had read and rejected the previous day. The Washington Post called it a "homily." Bell tells of looking around as Reagan spoke and noticing that "Ed Meese was standing there with a big smile on his face."[2]

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  1. Quoted in Terrel H. Bell, The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1988) p. 29.
  2. Ibid., p. 131.