A Nation At Risk From Itself
The power of bad ideas
As we contemplate the possible end of the federal Department of Education, I wanted to reflect on the last time its life was seriously threatened, and why it was spared. Because I think the story that saved the Department of Education in the 1980s may be the same reason it’s on the chopping block today.1
‘Islands of socialism’
The federal Department of Education came under threat almost from the moment it was created. President Carter carved it out from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1979, but from the very beginning, the department was defined more so by what it wouldn’t do than by what it would.
In the two-year battle to create the department, which David Stephens detailed in a 1983 article for Political Science Quarterly, Carter and his supporters in Congress struggled to gain consensus around the department’s role and how it would operate. At the heart of the debate was the concern that “the proposed department was a back-door method of ensuring that the education policies favored in Washington became those of the entire nation.”
To allay these fears, the Carter administration offered assurances that the department would be small, and that its scope would be limited. But conservatives were not convinced. It was around this time that Milton Friedman famously referred to public schools as “an island of socialism in a free-market sea.'' And the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” — a precursor to today’s Project 2025 — called for the dismantling of the department.2
“In the summer of 1980, Ronald Docksai, a legislative assistant to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, began holding planning meetings with 10 Capitol Hill colleagues — most of them also staff assistants to Republican members of Congress — to design the ‘blueprint’’ for a new federal education policy,” Eileen White wrote for Education Week in 1981.
“Their work, Mr. Docksai explained, was to outline for members of a conservative Administration how, if selected to lead the following November, they could most effectively ‘carry out the Republican convention mandate to abolish the Education Department.’”
“There was an automatic presumption that the more federal money, the better education would be,” former Heritage Foundation president Paul Weyrich told White. “We wanted to have a public-policy challenge to that premise.”
So with the “Mandate for Leadership” in hand, Reagan took aim at the young department as a candidate and as president, pledging in his 1982 State of the State address to do away with it.
“The budget plan I submit to you on February 8th will realize major savings by dismantling the Departments of Energy and Education and by eliminating ineffective subsidies for business,” Reagan said.
But Reagan didn’t follow through on his plan, thanks in part to the efforts of the nation’s first Secretary of Education, Terrel H. Bell.
A Nation at Risk
Bell’s strategy was to convince everyone that American public schools were dumpster fires, and that only his department could save the nation from descending into mediocrity.
As Frederick Hess details in ‘The “Clown Show” Backstory of the Most Influential Report on Schooling in American History,” Bell’s strategy to save his threatened department was to convince everyone that American public schools were dumpster fires, and that only his department could save the nation from descending into mediocrity.
Bell convened a blue-ribbon commission, which in 1983 produced ‘A Nation At Risk,’ a slim but powerfully influential report that famously charged, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
‘A national crisis would seem to demand a national response.’
If you haven’t read “A Nation At Risk,” I recommend giving it a read. It’s surprisingly short — both in content and in citations. As Hess writes, “Neither the data nor the recommendations are all that compelling.”
If you don’t feel like clicking through to the link, I’ll sum it up for you here. Hess’ commission argued that ‘a rising tide of mediocrity’ threatened America’s greatness at home and abroad. The report sounded an alarm that the United States was on the brink of being overtaken by ‘a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe.’ It argued that our democracy depended on ‘a high level of shared education,’ but warned that ‘for too many people education means doing the minimum work necessary for the moment, then coasting through life on what may have been learned in its first quarter.’
In short, we were falling behind.
This turned out not to be exactly true (read Anya Kamenetz’ great piece, “What ‘A Nation At Risk’ Got Wrong, And Right, About U.S. Schools,” for more on what the report got wrong). But the vibes of the report were so strong that its impact is still being felt today.
The report cemented in the national consciousness a key idea:
Our schools sucked.
First, this alarm bell was striking enough that it succeeded in keeping the Department of Education alive. Breathless headlines accompanied the report, and it captured so much popular attention that Reagan kind of had no choice but to act like it had been his idea in the first place.
“In the following months, Reagan highlighted the report and embraced its hard-hitting critique,” Hess wrote. “For all practical purposes, that pretty much ended his push to abolish the department. After all, a national crisis would seem to demand a national response.”
So the department stayed, and is still with us to this day. But the report’s other legacy was to cement in the national consciousness a key idea: Our schools sucked.
The power of this idea meant that the Reagan administration could attack public education without having to dismantle the Department of Education, all while he was claiming to save it.
“The report, while putting education near the top of the national agenda, has served as an undertow helping undermine confidence in educators and public schools while trashing government generally,” wrote James Harvey for the Washington Post in 2023.3
Reagan ignored the report’s calls for “the equitable treatment of our diverse population,” and inserted his own priorities, like prayer in school4, in their place. He went about untangling the department’s “jungle of grants-in-aid,” as he had called it in his 1982 State of the State5, and put states in charge of allocating federal funds to school districts in the name of “local control” and reducing federal bureaucracy.
But the idea that communities needed to have more say over what was happening in their local schools was an invention of political necessity — a priority of the Heritage Foundation, if not the American people. It was a made-up problem in search of a solution.
In fact, this move actually decreased local control over education, since it placed states as intermediaries between schools and their funding.
“Federal funds that had flowed directly to local districts were redirected to state government,” Gary Clabaugh wrote for Educational Horizons6 in 2004. “The result was to seriously erode the power of local school districts.”
What now?
Whether the current administration actually dismantles the Department of Education or not, it seems clear that the “public schools suck” narrative of “A Nation at Risk” continues to win the day.
And while that narrative may have been enough of a shock to the system that it granted the department a stay of execution in the 1980s, it has spread like a slow poison in the years since.
In 2023, Gallup reported that satisfaction in K-12 education had reached a record low.7 Since then, it has ticked up only slightly.8
“A Nation at Risk” shows us that it is far too easy to believe, with scant evidence to support it, that the sky is falling. And once we accept the falling-sky status quo as reality, it becomes very hard to to put the sky back up again.
This is the part where I should have an answer, or a solution, or tell you what to do about it. But I don’t have any of those things. Instead, I will tell you to read Garrett Bucks’ very excellent piece from a week ago, because he does have some very good ideas.
It is so important right now not to give in to despair, even though despair is what I feel when I read “A Nation at Risk” and think about how powerful it became. I choose to believe that the power of bad ideas can still be overcome by community, by the ideas that pass between people who care about each other and are connected to one another and are willing to get up and do the work. I am trying, very hard, to be one of those people. I hope you will try too.
To be clear: I think it would be a bad idea to abolish the Department of Education, for reasons that are spelled out very clearly here.
“Power, Visibility, Come To Heritage Foundation” (Education Week, 1981)
"Gaslighting Americans about public schools: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’ (Washington Post, 2023)
"The Educational Legacy of Ronald Reagan” (Educational Horizons, 2004)
“K-12 Education Satisfaction in U.S. Ties Record Low” (Gallup, 2023)
"About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction” (Pew Research Center, 2024)
Thank Emily, such an important essay. I believe in community, too.
I can't believe I wrote this whole essay without mentioning "The Manufactured Crisis" by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle. It is THE BOOK on "A Nation At Risk" and I highly recommend it!