“A nation at risk? Now more than ever,” Will says

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week’s melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic”— Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description—that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class—fractured families—would have to be faced. But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas—larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes—were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen. Read more of George Will’s opinion piece in The Washington Post online.