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THE 1980s: EDUCATION: OVERVIEW

Expanded Opportunity

In the early 1980s the educational policy catchword changed from equity to excellence. Battles had raged during the 1960s and 1970s over expanding educational equity and opportunity, and many Americans who had been excluded from the mainstream emerged as winners. The percentage of Americans graduating from high school rose from 50 percent in 1950 to 75 percent in 1980. In the 1970s the Education for All Handicapped Children Act had assured young Americans with disabilities of access to educational opportunities. From 1968 to 1978 the percentage of black student enrollment in colleges grew from 6.4 percent to more than 10 percent; for women, the numbers went from 39 percent to 48 percent. By the early 1980s access to higher education was nearly universal. A College Board study found in 1982 that one-third of all postsecondary institutions were "open door" (meaning any high-school graduate could attend), significantly fewer were "selective" (taking only those who qualified), and only 8 percent of colleges were "competitive" (accepting only a portion of those qualified).

The Pendulum Swings

Having successfully pursued goals of increased participation, educators in the late 1970s were vilified for neglecting the quality of education. By the late 1970s a groundswell of criticism emerged as Americans, who now assumed mass education as a given, focused on exactly how well the masses were being educated. The problems were multidimensional, but most critics agreed that when colleges lowered their entrance requirements in the 1970s, and most high schools abolished strict course requirements, the quality of education suffered. The common curriculum was lost when appeals to relevance brought an array of minicourses and electives, considered "soft" fare, replaced more-academic courses in science, math, and English. The curriculum, packed with courses such as values education, moral education, death education, consumer education, drug education, and driver education, failed to emphasize fundamental academic skills.

Early Alarm Bells

Bad news erupted by the early 1980s: Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores (the measure by which most colleges evaluated applicants) went on a downward spiral from 1962 through 1982, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 8 percent of seventeen-year-old American whites and 42 percent of the same age blacks were functionally illiterate. The report argued that automatic promotion had contributed to the problem and that the high-school diploma no longer represented any measurable level of proficiency. As a result of the report, many school districts adopted minimum competency testing for graduation. Between 1976 and 1980, thirty-eight states adopted these tests, a spontaneous national movement with no single spokesperson nor any one organization's promotion. On 22 October 1980, just weeks before Ronald Reagan's landslide presidential victory, the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, on orders from President Jimmy Carter, announced that America was headed toward "virtual scientific and technological illiteracy." Warning the citizenry that the United States was behind the Soviet Union, Japan, and West Germany in elementary and secondary science and math, the announcement claimed that the United States was in danger of losing its competitive edge; that while "the best seem to be learning as much as they ever did—the majority is learning less and less."

Assessments

Evidence was clear that students were learning less. In 1982 the California Roundtable investigating the situation in that state found that the school day and the school year had been shortened. Fewer than one-fifth of the students did a single homework assignment per week, and more than one-half of the students entering the California college and university system were placed in remedial math and English courses despite having good grades in those subjects in secondary schools. The National Center for Educational Statistics, the data analysts for the Department of Education, reported in 1982 that only 2.6 percent of the 1982 high-school graduates actually met the College Board's newly proposed graduation requirements. By 1980 the percentage of students studying foreign languages was down to 15, from more than 24 percent in 1964. In the early 1980s Ernest Boyer chaired the National Science Board's Commission on Precollege Education in Math, Science and Technology, and recommended federal spending of more than __BODY__ billion to offer courses most secondary students were not taking. In 1980, when the Gannett newspaper chain sent investigative reporting teams into twenty-four high schools, they found that the average public school had only about three hours of instructional time per day. Citing a "pervasive dilution of the secondary curriculum," the report catalogued high-school credit awarded for astrology, marriage simulation, cheerleading, child care, student government, and a host of other electives. And it was not just curriculum that presented problems. Absenteeism, formerly considered intolerable, was condoned, and parents nationwide reported in a Gallup poll that violence and discipline problems were their number one concern.

Pointing the Finger of Blame

Liberals and conservatives agreed that America's schools were not delivering a quality education, and ironically, they tended to agree as to the causes of mediocrity. Most conservatives were convinced that the increased federal presence in education had been a starting point for decay. Some more-liberal thinkers were also critical of federal intervention. For example, Democratic governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt commented on the television show Meet the Press in 1982 that "Federal involvement in education has been counter-productive. I believe it's responsible for some of the decline in quality." Other liberals tended to disagree with Babbitt, citing integration and access for bilingual and handicapped students as positive results of federal intervention. Liberal and conservative thinkers both blamed the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s for the sorry-state of education. Jay Sommer, the 1981 National Teacher of the Year, summarized the conservative view-point: "A period like the Sixties can have a devastating effect on learning and schooling." Too much student choice in curriculum was one of these effects, many argued. Christopher Lasch, a leftist critic, agreed with this assessment, asserting in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that democratization of education had eroded critical thought and intellectual standards without raising popular culture or equalizing wealth. Lasch ridiculed the wide-spread notion during the 1970s of abolishing grades: "Although defended on grounds of high pedagogical principle, this practice reflected a desire for less work and a wish to avoid judgment on its quality." Both camps agreed that teachers were facing more difficult and perilous times than ever before in American history, but conservatives were more likely to attack teachers as part of the problem. Ronald Reagan summed up this attitude in 1982 when he said, "Although America boasts thousands of fine teachers, in too many cases teaching has become a resting place for the unmotivated and unqualified. We should give teachers more honor and respect, and we should pay and promote on merit, but no hard-earned tax dollars should go to reward mediocrity." Also in 1982 Ernest Boyer, a more centrist thinker, suggested that the teaching profession had been "caught in a vicious cycle, spiraling downward. The rewards are few, morale is low, the best teachers are bailing out and the supply of good recruits is drying up." Other explanations shifted blame away from school personnel. Newsweek weighed in with the explanation that the 1960s and 1970s had brought a shift away from expository writing and real reading toward more "creative" modes of expression such as film, video, and photography—a shift that eroded basic intellectual skills. Conservatives agreed readily, condemning the schools for abandoning the "basics" while glorifying self-expression and free choice.

An Economic Explanation

Liberal thinkers such as Ira Shor, author of The Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-84 (1986), laid the blame at the feet of economic conditions. He attacked the "careerism" emphasis in education during the Nixon administration as particularly ill-timed. Just as baby boomers swamped the higher-education arena in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they swamped the job market in the late 1970s. Jokes abounded about how many Ph.D.'s were driving taxis, and aspiring graduates were as problematic as dropouts: what would society do with them all? Shor saw the educational problems of the 1980s as merely a mirror of economic frustration: "In too many corners of life there was unemployment, low wages, menial work, high rent, crime, drugs and the spectacle of the rich and powerful spending their way from midnight to dawn. The vast military machine dragged the economy down, and it took more to get less." The damage to schooling, Shor explained, was that education no longer facilitated social mobility. Surrounded by a depressed job market, shabby schools, and a base curriculum, average students ceased to believe that education mattered. Shor concluded that the decay in education was caused by the combination of the "culture of narcissism" and the career education debacle of the 1970s.

A Nation at Risk

If conservatives and liberals were not wholly in agreement on causes of the problem, they were united in recognizing the extent of the educational crisis after 1983. It was during this "year of wonder" in education that President Reagan's bipartisan National Commission on Excellence in Education produced the document A Nation at Risk, the indictment of the educational status quo that launched a sweeping reform movement. The tone of the foreword of A Nation at Risk epitomized the sense of urgency about reforming education in the 1980s: "If an unfriendly foreign power had been responsible for the state of education, it would be considered an act of war." A score of other studies came fast on the heels of this effort. Nationally more than one hundred commissions set up shop to work on school reform. These commissions were populated in the majority by powerful business and political leaders. The task force for the Reagan Commission on Excellence, for example, consisted of one classroom teacher, fourteen heads of major corporations, thirteen governors, one union leader, and various college presidents, school superintendents, and principals. The effect of these collaborations was powerful: well-meaning but limited reform efforts lead solely by educators were displaced by general, well-publicized programs for "excellence," the new key word in educational circles. Dozens of these community-wide efforts, led by teams of educators, business professionals, and politicians, identified three key areas for reform: 1) a comprehensive overhaul of curriculum, including proposed extensive new requirements for graduation and new testing regimes for students to assess that curriculum; 2) new management regimes for teachers, including such concepts as merit pay and teacher-competency testing; and 3) new business-education partnerships allowing business to have a greater force in shaping curriculum.

Colleges Face Dilemma

Although the vast majority of the reform efforts in the 1980s were aimed at elementary and secondary education, colleges suffered from the access-versus-excellence conundrum as well. The Carnegie Council on Policy in Higher Education in 1980 called the time "a golden age" for students because of declining enrollments and the increased competition for students. Former University of California chancellor Clark Kerr, the chair of this commission, said that 1980s college students would be "recruited more actively, admitted more readily, retained more assiduously, counseled more attentively, graded more considerately, financed more adequately, taught more conscientiously, and placed in jobs more insistently than ever before." Richard Berendzen, president of American University, predicted that the decade would be a "remarkably transitional time" for colleges. "We have never been worse off," he said. "Yet we Ve never had greater opportunities. There is no right age to go to school. We are open to all races. We have learned the importance of blending theory with the practical." Boyer's later Carnegie report in 1986 emphasized the continuing problems that resulted from colleges' attempts to retain their traditional and nontraditional constituencies. American higher education was "unmatched, but troubled," the report claimed. At the same time, the study predicted that colleges would become less selective and that a downward drift in quality was likely. This prediction, too, came to pass as many schools lost their sense of mission while scrambling for students. As Russell Jacoby reports in Dogmatic Wisdom (1994), his critique of postmodern American higher education, the college experience was altered in the 1980s by virtue of the influx of underprepared students: "A revamped higher education has elicited many reports of students not learning; teachers not teaching; college presidents not presiding."

A Shift in Emphasis for Higher Education

Many analysts blamed the problems in higher education on administrators who slighted the liberal arts as they attempted to satisfy student demands for career training. By 1984, for example, more than 50 percent of the nation's undergraduates chose to major in vocational or occupational fields. Clifford Adelman surveyed the courses taken by a representative sample of twenty-two thousand college students' transcripts, a source more reliable than queries to administrators as to educational requirements, and published his results in a 1992 book, Tourists in Our Own Land. In his longitudinal study he discovered that the total credits of the humanities and social sciences amounted to less than a third of the credits the students took. This emphasis on applied and vocational courses inevitably affected higher education in the 1980s. Too many schools were credentialing students rather than educating them. And college students seemed pleased to grab those credentials and get out into the business world. The hottest degree was the master of business administration, the MBA, while majors in philosophy decreased 65 percent, history by 50 percent, and English by 45 percent. "The pendulum has swung too far," said Williams Banowsky, president of the University of Oklahoma. The mercenary bent of college students in the 1980s was undeniable. According to a national survey in 1980, 62.7 percent of freshmen felt that status and money were their most important goals. As Jacoby laments in Dogmatic Wisdom, "An unbridled desire for practical knowledge and good money recasts higher education.…An exclusively commercial and instrumental vision degrades the enterprise."

The National Will to Change

American educational policy is typically pulled from extreme to extreme every ten years or so, according to educational historian Dianne Ravitch. The decade of the 1980s was unique in that nonpartisan coalitions of those from outside the educational establishment tended to establish goals that were much more centrist in nature. Why was the nation suddenly so willing to cooperate and attack problems they had formerly ceded to educators? The answer probably lies in economic conditions. According to Secretary of Labor William Brock in Nation's Business in 1985, the overwhelming majority of new jobs created in the United States would require postsecondary education, and America was not preparing the populace for this revolution. As Lamar Alexander, who earlier served as education secretary under Reagan, explained in 1986, "What has suddenly riveted everyone's attention on our education system is that our standard of living is threatened. We're not going to have the jobs and good incomes in America if we don't have the good skills." When the pocketbooks of Americans felt the effect of poor schooling, America became interested in improving the problems.

The Role of Business in Reform

The education policy developments of the 1980s strongly reflected the interest of business in education reform, according to Michael Timpane in Business Impact on Education and Child Development Reform (1991), his research study prepared for the Committee on Economic Development. Business interests produced three distinct types of initiatives consistent with the business agenda: 1) improving educational quality by raising standards for students, teachers, and schools and focusing on accountability; 2) restructuring schools as places of work and teaching as a profession; 3) focusing on the educational and social-service needs of at-risk children. Frank Doyle, senior vice president for public relations at General Electric, reiterated in 1984 the business community's concern about the last goal: "A competitive America—let alone a compassionate America—will need every trained mind and every pair of skilled hands.…When the GEs and GMs and AT&Ts and USXs of America no longer have low-skill, low-value-added jobs—because they have adjusted to a higher skill competitive world—those left out will be locked out of the great American middle class," Doyle warned. "And every time that happens, it is a tragedy for America," Reporter and writer William Greider takes a more skeptical view of the public-spirited rhetoric of the corporations, however. He argues in his book Who Will Tell the People? (1988) that like other multinational corporations, General Electric wants maximum freedom to do as it chooses in the global economy—shifting production and jobs wherever seems efficient. And it wants minimal responsibility, Greider claims, for the economic consequences created by the steady loss of high-wage industrial jobs. Timpane's report also tempers his assessment of the effectiveness of business in creating reform. His research study asserts that despite good intentions, business interests and involvement in school, reform did not solve educational problems in the 1980s. These projects in the local schools varied widely in scope and effect. Often the reforms "barely addressed, let alone provided, needed improvements in the larger educational system," he says.

The Political Climate

Nonpartisan commissions advocated reform, and conservatives and liberals found a great deal of common ground in recommending changes. However, their efforts were played out in a fiercely partisan Congress. Reagan's New Federalism marked a concrete and dramatic shift from the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 1970s, which targeted minority groups. Under Reagan's leadership congressional conservatives claimed a mandate to reduce the size of the federal government, restoring autonomy to the states by shifting federal financing into block grants. The 1980s marked the culmination of twelve years of effort under four presidents to undo what conservatives felt were the excesses of the previous administrations. For the prior two decades the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources had been the originating source for much liberal legislation, including all major education laws known as hallmarks of the Great Society: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Leading Democrats historically associated with this committee included John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Claiborne Pell, Jacob Javits, and Thomas Eagleton. In 1981 the committee majority shifted to Republicans, with Orrin Hatch as chairman overseeing several freshman conservative senators, including Dan Quayle. These conservatives favored none of the reforms of the Great Society and even demanded the abolition of the Department of Education.

A Distaste for Federal Spending

Although the Reagan administration claimed to support strong educational reform, financial support was not forthcoming. The administration pursued a fiscal strategy in the early 1980s that had direct educational impact: by cutting taxes before being able to cut spending, conservatives set the stage for cutting educational programs later in the name of fiscal austerity. Supporters of education bemoaned the lack of fiscal support for the reforms that nonpartisan groups had recommended. Sen. Ernest Hollings CD-South Carolina) complained on the Senate floor in 1986 that "Since release of A Nation at Risk, ten other reports which censure our nation's educational system have been released. They all agree on the dire need for reform. But the response to the plethora of demands has been to decrease the amount of available funding to education." As early as 1983, the budget for Title I programs (designed for helping dis advantaged children) was down 38 percent from 1981. By 1986 the percentage of the federal budget allotted to education was down to 1.6, from 2.3 percent in 1980. In 1987 House of Representatives Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Texas) railed against "misplaced priorities" in the presidential budget that zeroed out the GI Bill for Vietnam veterans and cut student college loans and work-study grants. These skirmishes illustrate the contradictions of the politics of education in the 1980s: the mood of the country reflected dissatisfaction with the status quo, yet the public refused to support increased money to fund reform. Although every reform commission recommended more spending on education, new leaders in Congress, reluctant to finance Great Society programs, were equally unenthusiastic about new federal spending.

Spending at the State Level

Unfortunately, during the 1980s an unprecedented decline in the fiscal health of the states, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, all but guaranteed that state funding levels would not rise. At the state level the problems were compounded by the fact that an aging population tended to resent school taxes for something they perceived as having little benefit to them, according to Michael Sehaller's analysis in his book, Reckoning with Reagan (1992). Meanwhile, a growing portion of the middle class, especially in cities, abandoned public schools, leaving public schools to educate a larger proportion of poor, minority, or otherwise disadvantaged children. Middle-class flight further reduced the school districts' ability to raise needed revenues. Working-class parents had less faith in the value of education, Schaller argues, and they saw school-tax increases as just another financial burden. These divisions accentuated the decline of faith in public education that characterized the 1980s. Because of these economic realities, dramatic educational reforms got more press attention than financial support.