In April 1983, a commission convened by President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, Terrel H. Bell, released a landmark report about the nation’s public education system, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It famously warned:
Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. … 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.
As I wrote in 2018, the authors used statistics to paint a disturbing picture of the country’s public system, though it turned out that a lot of the data was cherry-picked to confirm previously decided conclusions about the awful state of America’s schools. The piece I published, by James Harvey and David Berliner, explained how the report — and its aftermath in waves of school reforms — was bungled. It said, for example: