Schrag: The Zigs and Zags of Education Reform 50 Years After Sputnik

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, the Russian space satellite that, among other things, nationalized education as it had never been before.

In beating us into space, it was widely charged, the Soviets not only showed their superiority in science and technology but revealed America's dangerous educational failures. If we didn't shape up the schools, they'd win the Cold War. The date was Oct. 4, 1957.

As Congress struggles with re-authorization of NCLB, No Child Left Behind, the nation's complex education law, and California faces the governor's promised "year of education," it's a useful anniversary to remember.

In the half century since Sputnik, we've had an orgy of school reform, state and federal, beginning with NDEA, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, through NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing program (now calling itself "the nation's report card"), to ESEA, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and NCLB, the great Bush-era reform of 2002.

We've gone from merging little high schools into big schools so they could offer richer programs, then back to programs to break them up into small schools; from phonics to whole language and back; from less homework to more homework; from holding failing kids back to social promotion and then (again) to retaining those who didn't make the grade.

Ditto for magnet schools, open schools, "whole school reforms," busing, compensatory education, drug-abuse and sex-ed programs, direct instruction, discovery learning, and an endless parade of testing schemes and new curricula in math, science and history, many of them loudly introduced, then quietly abandoned.

And, as with the response to Sputnik, we've had no end of warnings from high level commissions that if we didn't improve schools, the Germans and the Japanese would beat our economic brains out or (more recently) that the Chinese and the Indians would do it. The consistent message: The schools could (and must) do it all. In the meantime, other critical economic and social service programs have been neglected.

There's hardly a politician or a business spokesperson who isn't an apostle of the faith. Just last week, President Bush declared that the latest NAEP test scores in reading and math showed that NCLB, the last vestige of his compassionate conservatism, was working. He thus measured one shaky premise with numbers from another.