Almost 20 years ago, in April 1983, a distinguished panel of 18 citizens distributed “an open letter to the American people” entitled A Nation at Risk.This prestigious panel warned us thatthe educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and as a people. (p. 1)
Let's face it, the panel had issued a pretty scary warning.
In the ensuing years, we have witnessed a number of well-intentioned efforts to reform U.S. schools, but most of those efforts have failed to yield genuinely substantive improvements. In my view, the reason that our education reform efforts have been only moderately effective is obvious—we have not been suitably bold. Although we are, documentably, citizens of “a nation at risk,” we have not devoted adequate daring to the renovation of our education system. In short, we have failed to take sufficient risks.
Yet risk-taking has always been a key component of our nation's zeitgeist. Think back to baseball's Babe Ruth, who first deliberately pointed to those faraway bleachers and then hit a home run to the very spot. And recall President John F. Kennedy, who daringly announced that we would be walking on the moon before the end of the decade. Clearly, both of those bigger-than-life Americans were consummate risk-takers. They risked and they succeeded. And that's what U.S. educators need to do without delay—embark on a no-holds-barred, high-risk campaign to hold back the “rising tide of mediocrity” threatening our nation's future.
A NASA-Like Commitment
President Kennedy set out to make good on that moon pledge by committing sufficient fiscal and human resources to a powerful national agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Well, it is time that we undertake bold, NASA-like risks to reform our nation's schools. In the remainder of this analysis, therefore, I will describe the kinds of activities that would fall under the purview of a new, heavily funded agency that I suggest be known as the National Risk Agency—that is, the NRA. Fortunately, there are already many card-carrying NRA members in the United States who may, because of those three letters alone, be inclined to support any risk-related initiatives of a new governmental NRA.
A Massive, Multifaceted Strategy
The first thing that the new NRA must do is design a massive, multifaceted strategy to turn around our schools. Massive, multifaceted strategies are inherently attractive because they are, by definition, both big and complicated. By that label alone, we demonstrate that the NRA's strategists will clearly be smart enough to mess around with more than one facet at a time.
But NRA's massive, multifaceted strategy to un-risk our nation must incorporate a host of educationally relevant things for the nation's educators to do. There are a flock of facets that I believe the NRA should address without delay. One of these suggested facets alone might make only a modest impact on school improvement. In concert, however, their synergistic effect could be wondrous.
In recent years, U.S. students have not sparkled on local, national, or international examinations. Thus, because students' test performance is so pivotal in determining whether our public schools are viewed as sparkling or sordid, as suggested by A Nation at Risk, we must use students' test scores as the chief index of the NRA's success.
A Rousing Slogan
To galvanize widespread support for its mission, NRA must adopt a suitably motivating national campaign slogan. That slogan must succinctly embody the NRA's raison d'être while at the same time calling on the nation's education community to take action. I encourage the new NRA to adopt and publicize the following slogan: “Test Scores—Up Yours!” Happily, this slogan is aimed not only at educators, but also at students themselves, whose test scores, after all, must surely be upped!
Medicine for the Mind
One of the first facets of the NRA's overall strategy should be to set up high-level, collaboration-engendering meetings with the leaders of our nation's pharmaceutical industry. The enlistment of the drug industry in a massive school-improvement strategy comes at a particularly propitious time. Stung by criticisms that their industry is gouging the public by charging far more for medicines than is necessary, U.S. pharmaceutical conglomerates have recently invested enormous sums of public-relations money in perception-altering video messages. We might see a TV ad, for example, depicting a smiling, older woman, happily playing with two charming children. She remarks,I wouldn't be here today, having a wonderful time with my grandkids, if it were not for the benign and altruistic research activities of the nation's pharmaceutical firms. Those folks really care about families!
Well, any industry that can stoop to such blatant image-enhancing television commercials will surely welcome with open arms an opportunity to take part in one of the NRA's patently patriotic school-reform initiatives. The specific goal of this initiative will be for the pharmaceutical industry to develop low-cost drugs that help students perform better cognitively. The trick is for today's drug industry to carry out a commendable, government-sanctioned investigative program leading to the creation of a research-proven pill that—neither habit-forming nor necessarily to be taken with food—will help students function optimally during any cognitive examination. Although the name of this score-boosting drug will ultimately be determined collaboratively by officials of the NRA and the pharmaceutical industry, I suggest “Testesterone.”
Once Testesterone has been screened by the appropriate government narcotics officials and produced in sufficient quantities, federal laws could quickly be enacted to install mandatory “reverse drug-testing.” During the week immediately prior to the administration of any high-stakes test, students who had failed to ingest sufficient quantities of their assigned score-boosting drugs would be identified. And for such forgetful or recalcitrant children, a sufficient amount of medication would then be administered, orally or intravenously, under restraint if necessary, in the school nurse's office. We want U.S. students to be successful.
Gene-Jiggling
Another facet that simply must be addressed in the NRA's overall game plan is that of genetic engineering. The strides made in recent years by the world's geneticists are almost unbelievable. Therefore, parents must be quickly made to fall in step with our nation's educational risk-reduction efforts.
It will soon be possible not only to clone human beings, but also to particularize the cloning process so that specific embryos can, if desired, contain explicit, parent-determined DNA codes. Thus, if NRA's research-stimulation efforts in this genetic arena are successful, it seems certain that parents who wish to rely on any variation of artificial fertilization will soon have options aplenty. Prospective parents can have decisive school winners with little more than a suitable double-helix selection. However, because test content standards vary so dramatically from state to state, it would clearly be necessary for parents to match a potential child's academic proficiencies to the specific content standards of the state in which the parents plan to reside. This, of course, gives whole new meaning to “curriculum alignment.”
The International Assessment Derby
During recent decades, whenever our nation's children have taken part in an international investigation of achievement, we invariably do not shine. On the contrary, it seems as though kids in every other nation, even those countries emerging into nationhood only hours before the administration of an international exam, tend to knock U.S. kids for a loop. And in view of our nation's constant quest for competitive success, it is particularly galling when we learn that the disadvantaged children of Burundi have decisively outscored all U.S. students not only in math and reading, but also in the geography of South Dakota.
The obvious remedy is to boost our children's test scores—and the NRA must be unabashedly committed to doing just that. However, a nation can clamber up the international assessment ladder in two ways: by raising its own nation's scores or by lowering the scores of other nations. If one fails, the NRA must try the other.
One straightforward way to make students' scores in other nations take a tumble is to install interventions that expose children of other countries to the same sort of mind-numbing experiences currently encountered by U.S. children. Consider the negative effect on a student's test performance of viewing even a few hours of U.S. television. Within a few years, you can be assured that the United States will look loads better on international tests. We will quite certainly have “leveled the playing field.” Who can be offended by such an even-handed pursuit of equity?
A Domestic Corollary
Although pulling down the performance of those nations that ranked higher can work wonders in creating a more palatable picture of U.S. students' performances on international tests, the same approach can also work right here at home.
When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act on January 8, 2002, he was opening many of the nation's educators to the prospect that they would soon be regarded as failures. According to the new law, fully 100 percent of the nation's children must, on the basis of statewide tests aligned with challenging content standards, be “proficient” or better in 12 years. That legislative aspiration positions scads of U.S. teachers and school administrators to look lousy.
One way of forestalling this perception is deceptively straightforward. All we have to do is create statewide tests in which “proficiency” success can be attained by all breathing children. This modest but meaningful public relations shift can be readily accomplished through the enactment of new federal education legislation called the No Child Too Damn Far Ahead Act. If nobody gets out in front, nobody is left behind!
Because we dare not allow any high-achieving students to make progress that might out-distance their peers, a key provision of this new law must be that any students whose test performances appear to be too high must be isolated in special schoolrooms where any form of serious study is explicitly prohibited. A variety of computer-based games, cartoons, comic books, and similarly innocuous products would be placed in those isolation rooms.
A side-benefit of this student-isolation strategy would be the initiation of a new field of serious investigative inquiry. Although education researchers have long been fascinated by the psychometric implications of the “ceiling effect,” they will soon be able to investigate the related, but heretofore unstudied, impact of the “sealing effect.”
Music and Hormones
The final two facets that must be incorporated in the National Risk Agency's full-range attempt to improve students' test scores revolve around popular music and “developmentally appropriate” sex.
Think carefully about the music that today's young people enjoy. If one listens attentively to that music, and I have often attempted to do so, there are substantial segments of it that are, quite literally, incomprehensible. And this, of course, is the reason that many messages in current teenage music must be regarded as developmentally appropriate. Although teenagers understand what is being said in today's music, most verbal components of current teen music are simply uninterpretable to adults.
What the NRA must undertake, therefore, is a major music-development effort intended to subtly suggest that high test scores will make a youngster not only as happy as a clam, but also sexually attractive. The idea is to capitalize on young people's hormonally controlled motivations by systematically infusing into teenagers' recorded music a series of messages, undetectable to adults, that meaningful test-preparation efforts can be an unparalleled sexual turn-on to others.
Once our nation's young people experience several years of this sometimes subtle, sometimes overpowering, musical advocacy of test preparation (coupled with a melodic adoration of high test-scorers), it is almost a certainty that U.S. students will regard education assessment not as an obstacle but rather as a yellow-brick road to rapture.
Great Risks, Great Gains
In the foregoing analysis, I have proffered a medley of admittedly risky tactics to boost U.S. students' test performances. Used together, these tactics can hold back the “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future.” Dire threats call for large dollops of derring-do. As the ages have taught us, “nothing ventured, nothing gained!”
