America’s Schools: Still Failing After All These Years

WHAT do the latest round of international test results released June 10 tell us about how American students are faring in the Nineties? President Clinton and his friends in the education establishment say they prove we’ve made great progress since 1983 when the famous report A Nation at Risk warned us that our kids were dangerously far behind their foreign peers.

That was Clinton’s spin, and the press bought it. “The findings may startle people used to thinking the worst of the schools, but they are consistent with generally positive trends in national tests,” wrote James Bennett in the New York Times. His colleague Peter Applebome quibbled about the size of the great leap forward, calling A Nation at Risk “brilliant propaganda,” echoing the trendy revisionist line that we never were as far behind as it said we were. Still, he agreed with his peers: we are doing much better now. Chalk up one more for the consensus.

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Barbara Lerner

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WHAT do the latest round of international test results released June 10 tell us about how American students are faring in the Nineties? President Clinton and his friends in the education establishment say they prove we’ve made great progress since 1983 when the famous report A Nation at Risk warned us that our kids were dangerously far behind their foreign peers.

That was Clinton’s spin, and the press bought it. “The findings may startle people used to thinking the worst of the schools, but they are consistent with generally positive trends in national tests,” wrote James Bennett in the New York Times. His colleague Peter Applebome quibbled about the size of the great leap forward, calling A Nation at Risk “brilliant propaganda,” echoing the trendy revisionist line that we never were as far behind as it said we were. Still, he agreed with his peers: we are doing much better now. Chalk up one more for the consensus.