Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Since the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, serious problems with public education remain unfixed, along with other longstanding problems.

In 1983, the bipartisan National Commission on Excellence in Education released its report, “A Nation at Risk,” on the sorry state of K-12 education in the U.S. Since then, the state of public education has shown little improvement—and in some respects has worsened—in spite of significant increases in per-student spending, on average, in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only serious problem that the U.S. seems incapable of fixing.

Of the many other problems, the problem of the nation devouring its seed corn is one of the most serious. In 1983, the federal debt was $207.8 billion. It is now a staggering $34 trillion, or about $94,000 per person. Nearly 46 percent of federal income tax revenue now goes to interest payments on the debt, and 74 percent of federal spending is on automatic pilot and unaffected by the annual budget process. 

Contrary to economic hokum from some quarters, it is not possible to increase corporate and individual taxes enough to make up the gap between spending and revenue without destroying what is left of the market economy.

It’s not as if politicians and the public didn’t have any warning about deficit spending. There was a budget surplus in only four years between 1983 and today, so there was ample time to recognize the problem of deficit spending and do something about it.

In keeping with this tragic tradition of ignoring the problem, deficit spending and the debt have reached gargantuan levels but still are not issues in the current presidential race or in the races for Congress.

Warnings about public education have also been clear. In 1983, the first page of “A Nation at Risk” said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Just eleven years earlier, in 1972, President Richard Nixon made his famous trip to China, to open up trade and diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communists, as part of a Cold War strategy to isolate the Soviet Union. At the time, China was an impoverished and poorly educated country. Today, by some measures, it now ranks near the top in student achievement.

Keep in mind that “A Nation at Risk” was written years in advance of the deleterious effects on education of smartphones, social media, on-line gaming, a constant barrage of targeted ads encouraging immediate gratification, and social-media influencers who model harmful behavior.

Amazingly, many parents and others say that none of this interferes with learning. They even resist attempts by schools to ban cell phones in the classroom.

The members of the commission who wrote the 1983 report said that they had listened to the frustration of parents and students, high school and college officials, school board members and teachers, business leaders, minority groups, and state officials. “We could also hear the intensity of their frustration, a growing impatience with shoddiness in many walks of American life, and the complaint that the shoddiness is too often reflected in our schools and colleges.”

Imagine what they would write if they returned to see how social, cultural, intellectual, and behavioral norms have degraded since 1983.

It’s not as if the norms were exemplary in 1983. “A Nation at Risk” detailed the significant decrease over the previous decades in the number of hours that students spent in the classroom and in doing homework.

The report also detailed how much grades had inflated in the years prior to 1983, with considerably fewer students getting a “C” or lower and considerably more getting a “B” or higher.

At the same time, to quote from the report, “The College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980.  Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.”

The report went on to say, “Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in 4-year colleges increased by 72 percent and now constitute one-quarter of all mathematics courses taught in those institutions.”

Grade inflation has continued since 1983.  According to a U.S. Department of Education study, grade point averages of high-school graduates had risen from 2.7 (a C+) in 1990 to 3.1 (over a B) in 2019.

With respect to the SAT, many colleges have done away with the test altogether as an admission requirement.

The College Board also changed the way that Advanced Placement tests are scored, so that more students can pass and get college credit for taking AP courses. An AP history teacher lamented in a recent Wall Street Journal story that 76 percent of his students were now passing the history test, versus 40 percent previously.

Regarding colleges of education, the 1983 report said that too many students majoring in education come from the bottom quarter of college-bound students and that the education curriculum is weighted too heavily in instructional methods instead of such subject matters as math, English, and history.

The report claimed that teachers are low-paid but said nothing about the power and influence of teacher unions.  The unions are now so powerful that it’s not as farfetched as it sounds to state that the U.S. Department of Education is a subsidiary of the unions, in an extreme case of what is known as regulatory capture.

Understandably, the report didn’t mention how Finland has transformed its educational system, because the transformation wasn’t complete at the time of publication.

Finnish teachers are paid better than their American counterparts, but the requirements to be a teacher are significantly higher. All Finnish teachers are required to have a master’s degree before entering the profession, and teacher colleges are the most rigorous and selective professional schools in Finland. Individual principals also have the authority to take remedial action if a teacher isn’t performing well. As a result, teachers have the public’s respect and trust. 

These and other reforms have moved Finland to the top of international rankings of student achievement, without the need for students to take government-mandated standardized tests to see whether they are learning. Of course, reforms are dramatically easier in a nation with a homogeneous population of only 5.5 million,

Reforms are exponentially more difficult in a nation as large, diverse, and divided as the United States, especially when so many special interests and individuals are doing just fine under the status quo.

Colleges have benefited from the money flowing from the tuition loan scam, from perpetuating the notion that a degree is necessary to make a good living, and from the lowering of admission standards. Teacher union honchos have benefited from their unions gaining political power and member dues. Regulatory consultants, regulatory lawyers, and state and federal education bureaucrats have benefited from the red tape that is strangling efficiency and innovation in education. Social media companies, advertisers, the sports and entertainment industries, and other industries have benefited from societal shoddiness and degradation.  Wall Street has benefited from GDP and corporate earnings being inflated by deficit spending. And politicians have benefited from not being held accountable for any of this.

The maintainers of the status quo should be frightened by the thought of a well-educated populace of independent thinkers. Maybe that’s why they keep undermining attempts to reform public education.