Full article by Gerald Bracey can be read here:
The schools never recovered from Sputnik, but the next major blow didn't land until 20 years later in On Further Examination. This booklet reported the findings of a panel assembled by the College Board to figure out what had caused the then 14 year decline in SAT scores. The panel blamed mostly demographic changes in who was taking the tests along with the social upheavals of the 60's and early 70's. The public blamed the schools.
In 1983, the paper Sputnik, A Nation at Risk, ascended to its own orbit. This golden treasury of spun and selected statistics is still often referred to in some quarters as a "landmark"study. After that, the nation experienced a rising tide of education reform reports. Leaders and Laggards is only the most recent of many. It does, though, carry a special panache, being a joint venture of a conservative group, the Chamber of Commerce, and a putatively liberal group, the Center for American Progress.
In the last 20 years, many educational concepts have become identified with a political side. Phonics belongs to the Right, Whole Language to the Left and so forth. But statistics indicating school failure know no such divide. The bogus "lists" indicating the worst problems in the schools in the 40's (chewing gum, breaking in line, speaking out of turn, etc.) and in the 80's (drugs, violence, pregnancy, etc.) were adopted equally by Left and Right. The more recent but equally bogus "600,000 Chinese engineers" statistics gained immediate acceptance everywhere, cited by liberal and conservative alike as one more indicator of what we already know: the schools suck.
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