Achievement: 1983–Present

Milton Goldberg Worried. As he entered the White House State Dining Room with the members of the commission that he had staffed for the previous two years, the teacher and administrator from Philadelphia pondered what the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, would say about the report on which they had labored so vigorously. Everyone understood that most federal commission documents descend into immediate obscurity. He feared that destiny for their report. He also feared that the president would call again for policies, such as prayer in schools, vouchers for private school tuition, tuition tax credits, or abolition of the Department of Education (Goldberg’s current employer), that the commission had not endorsed. The president strode vigorously into the room as Goldberg rose anxiously. Reagan genially introduced the report, saying that it fully accorded with his earlier enunciated views on education. Obviously he had not read the report since it did not deal with any of those issues. This report was Reagan’s last major presidential effort on education, although he continued to discuss education in various speeches. The commissioners, who sought public attention for their report as a stimulus to change, feared that the press would now ignore the report, believing they had written a Reagan-support document. As one of the commissioners, physicist Gerald Holton, reported, the authors were appalled and one said loudly enough for the press to hear, “We have been had.” Hearing the remark, journalists in attendance suddenly developed an intense interest in the report. They immediately recognized a profound disconnect between the Reagan administration’s rhetoric about education and the content of the report. Both the political disconnect and the subject matter initially intrigued them, but the substance of the document caught the public’s attention and has remained there for nearly a quarter of a century. A Nation at Risk alerted the American people, often in rather colorful and occasionally purple and erroneous prose, to the danger the country faced if the academic achievement of schoolchildren did not improve.