Bonus:
Summary: READ THE FUCKING BOOK WHEN IT'S ONLY 20 PAGES!
Commentary:
My wife had to read "A Nation At Risk" for a class recently. In short, it's the first big "America's schools are failing!" report from the 80s. It's not very long. The PDF linked there is about 70 pages, but the report itself (minus appendices, lists of meetings, etc.) formats to about 20 pages of standard text. For as short as it is, it's surprisingly malleable, easily vilified as the start of whatever the current evil in education (according to professors, though leaders, and the like) is currently at issue. As commonly presented, it was a partisan hack job, written by people with minimal relation to education, that exists primarily to blame teachers.
By most conventional measures (teaching kids to read, write, do math, etc.) it's fairly non-controversial to say the US education system is a failure. Depending on which study you look at, definition you use, etc. almost 90% of kids graduate high school, but ~25% are borderline illiterate, with another ~30% valiantly struggling up to a middle school reading level. Math usually comes out a bit worse, with around 60% making it to basic algebra on a good day.
There's a ton of factors at play here. Some totally out of the school's control (kids born with significant disabilities), but it's pretty hard to make an argument for success when more than half the kids graduating 12th grade are struggling (at best) to handle 8th or 9th grade level work.
Why is that?
If you actually read "A Nation At Risk", the reasons include: low expectations in curriculum, lack of incentives to meet even these standards, not enough time in school, poor textbooks and other materials, and lack of budget.
There is a section on teachers, and it does say that many teachers are drawn from the lower levels of their high school and colleges, poor teacher prep, not enough pay, and a shortage of qualified teachers.
Hardly a damning condemnation.
On the other hand, the recommendation section on teachers includes: Raising standards for teacher ed, improving salaries, peer review, more time for planning and development, better opportunities for advancement, greater input by teachers in curriculums, training, etc.
Obviously, not every teacher is going to love everything, but it's hardly a hatchet job. Despite frequent claims that teachers weren't consulted for the report, several sections directly reference publications by teachers unions and similar groups.
As a teacher, it's a continual source of frustration to me that it seems like 90% of education professors, leaders, etc. just don't engage with basic facts. The amount of presentations I've sat through where people didn't even know what was on their own slides, etc. is embarrassing.
There's a lot of whining about how teachers aren't respected enough as a profession, but if you can get a doctorate and write a whole book dunking on a report without actually presenting it honestly (or maybe reading it in the first place), you're the problem.
