Nation at Risk

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        In April 1983, President Ronald Reagan presented the United States with a report written by a special commission he put together to examine the public school we have in America. This report was named A Nation at Risk.  According to this report, the American school system was all over the place. Teachers were not getting paid enough, test scores were low, a lot of children were illiterate and one reason was because the teachers weren’t educated enough. A Nation at Risk included special accommodations on how we could get the school systems back on track.

        Ronald Reagan wanted to make the school system more difficult. He wanted to increase the difficulty on the curricula, challenging students to do better and be smarter. The entire nation was at risk of falling apart because our education was subpar. The other countries were better, they were smarter than us. They were excelling in math, science and technology. If we wanted to excel like the other countries then America needed to challenge the students with higher standards, more homework and this thing we know now called accountability.

        Reagan also believed that we needed new standards. Having new standards meant that our students would needed to excel in certain things to pass onto the next grade and then graduate high school. This is one reason why the report suggested the states adopt new, rigorous standards that required the students to meet higher level requirements in order to get their high school diploma. One standard the states put into place were No Child Left Behind, also known as the NCLB. The NCLB law was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. It was a civil rights law that provided education funding to states and attempted to ensure that every student had an access to an education. As President George W. Bush said  "The fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning," We also had the Every Student Succeeds Act, often called ESSA. In 2015, President Obama signed the ESSA. It provides support to high schools with groups of traditionally underserved students who consistently demonstrate low performance. Under this law, the states have flexibility to go their own path to gain educational success, but must submit their plans to the U.S. Department of Education stating how they plan to reach these goals.

        A Nation at Risk also focused on teacher preparation and the pay. In the report it stated how some teacher training did not provide an adequate training for teachers. Therefore the teachers were not trained properly. If the teachers had no knowledge on the information then there students will be just as clueless as them. Since teachers were paid far less than any other field that needed a college degree, there were a shortage of qualified teaches. You would have a music teacher teaching a science class, or a English teacher teaching a science class. The report suggested the teacher training program require more prospective teachers and that he teacher pay be tied to the students achievement.