Nation At Risk

In the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk” presented by President Reagan, the state of the American public school system as analyzed. At the time the report was written almost twenty-three million Americans were illiterate. On top of the illiteracy epidemic, standardized test scores had been decreasing since the Russians launched sputnik almost twenty-five years prior. Edward Graham of the National education association states, “Test scores were rapidly declining, low teaching salaries and poor teacher training programs were leading to a high turnover rate among educators, and other industrialized countries were threatening to outpace America’s technological superiority”. American education was in a downward spiral. A strong national education …show more content…
As stated earlier students were able to coast through schooling with zero effort. The content of the public school curriculum and the time spent on education had to been reformed. At my high school we went to school from 7:35am till 2:53pm, five days a week (making exceptions for holidays). We got about two to three weeks off for winter break and a little over two months off for summer vacation. Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” suggested that schools in the 80s, increase the school day, school year, and the efficiency of time during the school day. Prior to “A Nation at Risk” the United States went to school for one hundred and eighty days a year while some nations attend school for as many as two hundred and forty days a year. From 2007-2008 the average U.S. high school attended school for one hundred and eighty days a year for just under seven hours a day. Reagan wanted more time in school, which some may argue we got, despite no change in the amount of actual school days. However he also wanted better quality, which I feel did not happen. I personally was not alive to experience schooling in the eighties but I do know that I learned every word to “Finding Nemo” and “Happy Gilmore” in high school, but I have no clue how to solve for a diagonal asymptote. Schooling relied too much on learning from homework and less from actual teaching. Teachers would rather put on a video or movie …show more content…
President Reagan had an ingenious vision for the future of the American public schooling. He had expressed many real problems but never directly offered a solution. The problems brought up in the report needed dire attention, and the report got them the attention they needed. The first step to solving a problem is awareness. Even though the problems still exist today, because of “A Nation at Risk” people are constantly thinking of solutions on how to fix the education system. Schools are proposing modern curriculums, longer school years, and new teaching methods catered toward students learning patterns. Even though we are not where Reagan envisioned us to be today, we are in a nation that is viewed as a global super power. Other nations envy our systems. “A Nation at Risk” opened the American public’s eye to vast room for improvement in the American public school