Balance (1965 - 1990)
Uneasy Balance
Public focus has shifted from inputs into the education system to student outcomes-especially those provided by student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Maris Vinovskis
"A Reliable and Valid Comparison of What Students Have Learned in School" The Federal Government and the Development of State-Level NAEP Student Assessments
Mirroring the social and political changes that occurred from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, education underwent major changes in the conceptualization of educational problems and solutions. The major shift was from focusing on educational inputs, or what went into the education of young people, to focusing on outcomes, or more specifically the measure of what students know and can do after the educational experience.
From the 1960s through the late 1970s, concern about equal educational opportunity for poor and minority populations focused attention on ways to compensate for previous cultural or educational deprivation. Making equal the inputs into the educational equation for all young people drove policy at all levels of the educational system.
Generating this emphasis was the Civil Rights Movement and after 1970, the Coleman Report, which had been issued in 1966. Commissioned by the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, sociologist James Coleman surveyed over one-half million students and 60,000 teachers in 4,000 U.S. public schools and found that most American children attended segregated schools. Coleman found that there was an achievement gap between minority and middle-class white students and that academic achievement was strongly related to socioeconomic factors. Some policy makers began to use the Coleman Report as a way to argue for certain policies, such as busing, as a means to eliminate desegregation.
Policy aimed at making educational inputs equal included efforts at desegregation and compensatory education for minority and low-income students who did not receive the same educational opportunities as middle-class children. The federal government's Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) provided funding and legal backing for these policy initiatives.
After the early 1980s, concern about young people's ability -- or, more exactly, the perceived inability of young people to excel academically and contribute to the economic well-being of the country led to an emphasis on student achievement and outcomes. Contributing to the perceived decline in academic ability was the decline in the mean SAT scores. The Scholastic Aptitude Test scores dropped approximately 50 points on the verbal section and approximately 30 points on the mathematical section from 1963 until 1977.
Combined with the recession in the American economy and the competition that Asian markets provided in the market, the perceived decline in academic ability made many people think that there was a national educational emergency. Many in society at large blamed a faulty educational system for producing high school graduates with lower academic abilities than their Asian and European counterparts.
This situation was catapulted into the national spotlight with the U.S. Department of Education's 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. By this time, the federal government's visibility and role in educational affairs had expanded greatly, even in the political creation of a separate, cabinet level Department of Education. This national position, the Nation at Risk report, and societal concern generally set the stage for educational reform initiatives that focused on educational outcomes.
