690
PAIl.,TISAN REVLEW
the publication of
A Nation at Risk
by the National Commission on
Excellence in Education in 1983. That report warned of a "rising tide of
mediocrity" in the schools, which would lead
to
a lowered standard of
living, The report was as stunning an indictment of the American educa–
tion system as can be imagined, and it had a dramatic effect. Scores of
task forces and commissions were created to react to its recommenda–
tions, and many states increased their graduation requirements for high
school students,
The most emphatic response to the report occurred in the southern
states, where the Southern Regional Education Board began pressing for
higher standards and for tests to measure progress, SREB states, including
Tennessee (whose governor was Lamar Alexander), South Carolina
(whose governor was Richard Riley), and Arkansas (whose governor was
Bill Clinton), agreed to raise academic standards and even campaigned
for state-by-state comparisons in the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, the national test regularly administered to large samples of stu–
dents in order
to
report on the progress of American education,
In
1989, President Bush convened the nation's governors in
Charlottesville, Virginia, and they jointly agreed to set goals for the na–
tion's schools for the year 2000. When the goals were announced in
early 1990, they included a pledge that American students would be first
in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000, and that
American students would be able to demonstrate competency in chal–
lenging subject matter, including mathematics, science, history, geogra–
phy, and English. An organization called the National Education Goals
Panel was created to monitor progress towards the goals; the panel
consists of governors, members of Congress, and representatives of the
administration.
While Lamar Alexander was Secretary, the U.S. Department of
Education made grants to professional and scholarly groups to develop
voluntary national standards in science, history, the arts, civics, geogra–
phy, English, and foreign languages. The grant recipients agreed to define
what American children shou ld know and be able to do in various fields
of study, that is,
content
standards. (I was assistant secretary for the Office
of Educational Research and Improvement, which made the grants.) The
Democratic majority on the powerful House Education and Labor
Committee was less than happy and periodically threatened to suspend
our funds and to prohibit the standard-setting activities we funded, but
we pushed ahead.
The standards for mathematics had already been published by the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Their success provided a
model. Because the new national standards for mathematics were so
