40 Years Later

Recently, The 74 asked Margaret Raymond to reflect on the past 40 years of American public education, after the release of the report “A Nation at Risk.” Raymond’s conclusory essay to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution’s “A Nation at Risk + 40” research initiative spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. Raymond is the founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. What follows are excerpts from Raymond’s 74 article titled “A Lot Has Changed in the 40 Years After ‘A Nation at Risk.’ But the School System? Not So Much.”:

“In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) released A Nation at Risk (ANAR), which issued a wake-up call, named the state of US education a crisis, and presented thirty recommendations for action. It bears noting that the Commission’s recommendations were targeted in focus and scope, leaving the prevailing ‘one best’ district-based education model intact. We will never know whether larger-scaled interventions were considered or not. Whatever the genesis, the final recommendations left education policymakers with an organizational checklist…”

“A National at Risk + 40 brought together twelve exceptional scholars and thought leaders to review the nation’s response to the Commission’s challenge. At the outset of this research collaboration, compiling the record of forty years of school improvement efforts and summarizing the available evidence of their respective impacts on student outcomes appeared straightforward, if even a bit tedious. It turned out to be anything but that.”

“Each of the twelve essays fulfilled its assignment. In each strand of investigation, the authors documented the evolution of improvement activity and – where it exists – described the degree to which the efforts paid off. On its own, every one of the essays makes an important contribution to our ongoing national conversation about the critical state of the public K-12 education sector. While we make no claim that the scope of inquiry was definitive, the separate reviews cover billions of dollars in major programs and initiatives pursued by districts, states, and philanthropy. Many of these initiatives were incentivized by Congress and span Republican and Democratic presidential administrations….”

For the sake of brevity, Raymond’s focus on outcomes and a conclusion will be the focus for this piece, but her entire article is informative and can be found online.

“In an education theory of action, outcomes are the final results of the entire enterprise. Outcomes differ from outputs because they apply external standards and criteria to the nominal outputs to make judgments about what is ‘good enough.’ So, while outputs may be expressed as test scores, CTE credentials, or course completions, when we apply evaluation standards such as postsecondary readiness, we are making judgments about the performance that was produced.”

“Since ANAR was released, we have gained clarity, if not conviction, about what we intend our schools to produce. [I would take exception to this claim. It seems to me like we are working on all of the wrong skills to make our kids smarter and stronger in the 21^st century. Case in point – the amount of time secondary students are allowed to build their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills in our traditional K-12 system.] Performance frameworks that illustrate the results that stakeholders deem desirable have grown in number and complexity. Across the country, charter school authorizers and state and local school boards use performance frameworks as central elements of school and district oversight and accountability. Newer examples of our collective expectations are seen in the work in some states to define the profile of a graduate, setting explicit criteria for what a high school diploma should represent.”

“By law, every state reports publicly on how its students and schools are performing. State-issued ‘report cards’ for districts and schools generally include demographic information for teachers and students, operational and financial information, and student academic performance information. States set thresholds for student and school performance expectations, though these thresholds vary a lot. Whatever their aspirations, we are not in vastly different territory today than in 1983. Disappointing outcomes (e.g. high school math performance) have even prompted attempts to improve the optics by diluting some of the criteria (such as watering down the instructional frameworks or course requirements), but such maneuvers do nothing to alter the underlying reality.”

“As Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo said, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’ Indeed, the staggering array of treatments, interventions, redesigns, and innovations that our authors identified makes it a challenge to rationalize our collective experience into any semblance of order. If we had aimed for chaos at the outset, it is hard to imagine a better result.”

“Despite the cacophony, the catalog of activity amassed by the authors supports a few observations about our forty-year effort to reform that hold potential for illuminating future directions for elementary and secondary education in our country. After identification, we can characterize the record of reform efforts with six I’s: impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent, and ineffective, as [summarized] below.”

“Impulsive – Most of the reforms were adopted at full scale – across an entire state or the nation. Many efforts to push programs across states or regions had roots in advocacy pressure to move reforms quickly. Many state leaders were game to bring new policies to their state if they were perceived as having been successful elsewhere, as it reduced the perception of risk and provided an existing model to copy.”

…

“Incremental – The most pervasive attribute is the incremental nature of the interventions. This stems in part from the original recommendation of the ANAR Commission, framed as commonsensical and achievable changes. The commitment to incrementalism continued even when earlier efforts proved ineffective. One might argue that it made sense to aim small to soften implementation friction. The record suggests otherwise. Because the interventions were mostly narrowly focused, not only did they lack the scope or initial scale necessary to drive needed system changes, but in their sheer volume – so many reforms in so many areas – they led to a reform fatigue that lasts to this day.”

…

“Incoherent – A third observation is that most of the changes undertaken over the past decades were launched with no consideration for how the reform would interact with the rest of the K-12 system. Changes to piece parts were designed and adopted as autonomous endeavors. This partially explains why many innovations fail to scale effectively.”

…

“Impatient – A separate issue that permeates the essays is the (often understated) expectation that improvement efforts produce large demonstrable results almost immediately and without regard to the time requirements of the change being made.”

…

“Intransigent – The authors carefully identified examples of reforms that produced positive student learning impacts, but many were subject to political interference or failed to perform at scale. Still, the examples show what may be possible. What they do not show is the complementing picture of the myriad reforms that went nowhere and evaporated into history. There is no tally of their number.”

…

“Ineffective – The strongest case for learning from our experienced lies in our national trends on student performance. Given the authors’ reports, it is little wonder that, even before the blow to student learning of COVID-19 school closures, the long-run reports noted that US students performance was stagnant or in decline.”

…

And what is Raymond’s conclusion?

“What we do have is an impressive record of what not to do. We can’t assume that ideas that have been proven effective in one setting will be effective in every setting. We can’t expect change at the margins (no matter how well they are done) to be able to leverage an entire school model. We can’t impose reforms that ignore how the change affects other parts of the enterprise. We should accept these lessons as a form of learning in itself and perhaps the best final message of this exercise….”

And guess what? School districts continue to practice all of Raymond’s list of what not to do at an alarming rate across the nation.

Til tomorrow. SVB