A

BOYER, ERNEST L. 1928-

CHANCELLOR OF STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW
YORK; US. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION;
PRESIDENT OF CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR
THE ADVANCEMENT OF
TEACHING

From Teacher to Administrator

Ernest L. Boyer was one of the most influential voices in the calls for educational reform in the 1980s. As the head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, beginning in 1980, the issues he addressed received national attention. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Boyer moved west to receive his doctoral degree in audiology at the University of Southern California in 1957. He became a professor of speech pathology and audiology and academic dean at Upland College, but in 1960 he reached what he called a "crucial crossroad" in his life when he switched from teaching to administration. When he accepted a position with the Western College Association, the California Board of Education had ordered all public schoolteachers to obtain a degree in an academic discipline, and Boyer was appointed director of the commission charged with carrying out the directive. In 1962 he assumed the director-ship of The University of California's Center for Coordinated Education, where he administered projects to improve the quality of education from kindergarten through college. At this early point in his career he began to develop an understanding of the needs of the entire system of public education.

Dealing with Cutbacks in Funding

From 1970 to 1977 Boyer was chancellor of the State University of New York, a complex system of sixty-four campuses, hundreds of thousands of students, and fifteen thousand faculty members. He assumed his duties during a period of crisis in state and federal support of higher education. In 1976 declining government support forced Boyer to take rigorous economizing measures, including halting construction on partly finished buildings and freezing enrollment. Although he was criticized by teachers and students, his proponents argued that he had wisely taken on the burden of cutting costs himself rather than leaving it to the legislature to make even deeper cuts. These political experiences in educational financing served him well later in his career.

From Government to the Carnegie Foundation

During a stint as President Carter's federal commissioner of education, responsible for administering education pro-grams involving billions of dollars, Boyer was frustrated by the failure of Congress to pass a bill creating a new, cabinet-level Department of Education. In 1980 he be-came president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization that held income-producing assets worth more than $35 million. There, he said, his first priority would be efforts to re-shape the American high school. "I am convinced that the high school is the nation's most urgent education problem," he told an interviewer.

High School: A Report

In 1983 Boyer released the result of a fifteen-month study of the nation's high schools that was conducted by twenty-eight prominent educators. The results suggested that although 15 per-cent of American high-school students were getting "the finest education in the world," about twice that number were merely passing time. The study recommended development of a core curriculum for all students; designated mastery of the English language, including writing, as the central curriculum objective for all students; and a gradual increase in teachers' pay of 25 percent, after making up for inflation. Boyer felt that a lack of creative teaching was crippling the high schools; as he said, "To my mind, teaching is the nub of the whole problem.…All other issues are secondary." This massive study contributed significantly to the reform debate of the 1980s, and its recommendation for core curriculum and higher standards became key issues in policy struggles.

Boyer Tackles the Colleges

In 1986 Boyer released College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, "the most systematic study ever done of four-year colleges," a project which involved surveys of forty-five hundred undergraduates, five thousand faculty members, and more than one thousand college administrators on twenty-nine campuses. This report found that colleges, like the high schools, were ""troubled." Boyer wrote that American higher education was "driven by careerism" and was more successful in "credentialing than in providing a quality education." Boyer contributed to the national movement toward strengthening curriculum. After he issued his re-port, many colleges accepted the recommendations to require a core curriculum embracing language, the arts, history, social and governmental institutions, and the natural sciences. The book form of this report, College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, has been called "the most thorough look at undergraduate colleges ever taken.…the best book to read for the student preparing to get the most out of his or her undergraduate experience."

Boyer's Effect on Education

In 1987 Boyer trained his sights on the earliest years of a child's education. Noting that much of the reform efforts of the late 1980s were bypassing many impoverished children, Boyer proposed improvements in nutrition, prenatal care for teen mothers, more-effective day care including summer programs, and preschool education. During the decade Boyer influenced educational policy in numerous ways: he championed academic credentialing of secondary teachers; he demonstrated tough-minded coping with financial cutbacks; and he advocated a more rigorous, coherent curriculum at the high-school and college level. His clear-minded willingness to seek consensus rather than conflict did much to advance these issues.