Episode 4: 1980-2002

Abstract

This episode covered the most recent years of school from the 1980s to 2002. There were a lot of trends happening in education during this time period. In the early 1980s everything seemed to be going well. We were educating the majority of youth and 85% of students graduated from high school, which was the highest percentage it had ever been. The government tried to blame the poor economy on schools, and the report A Nation at Risk was published. This called for higher standards in schools, which led to standardized testing in all grades. The annual cost for standardized tests was 500 million dollars. The idea of school choice was introduced to try to get students more interested in their education, and schools in Wisconsin tried a voucher program where low income students were able to attend private/non-religious schools at the public schools expense. Charter schools were also introduced during this time as a public school that did not have a superintendent. The government provided more than 80 million dollars to improve charter schools. In 2002, 90% of children were enrolled in public school. After all the experiments with different types of schools, we found that all students need excellence and equality.

Reflection

It is amazing to see how many educational trends and programs were developed in the 1980s and 90s. I think most of these trends were just experiments in an attempt to fix our schools. A Nation at Risk probably scared a lot of people into believing that the educational system was failing, but pushing for higher standards and No Child Left Behind was not the way to address the problem. However, some of the trends like magnet schools seemed to benefit students. I would be interested in looking at school systems in other countries and compare them to those in the U.S.