The Commission outlined a set of urgent recommendations for educational reform that centered around curriculum, standards and expectations, time, leadership and fiscal support, and, that Gordian knot, teaching. How much of the substance of the report was new? The Commission concluded, somewhat poignantly, that “[S]ome of our findings are not new, but old business that now at last must be done.”

Perhaps it was the stirring, at times scalding, rhetoric of A Nation at Risk as much as its substance that helped keep education etched in the public’s mind and near the top of the national agenda in the years that followed. The report’s metaphorical call to arms, after all, still has a powerful emotional charge: “If an unfriendly 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. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral disarmament.” A Nation at Risk clearly sounded the alarm for educational reform, and a diverse group of “warriors”—parents, educators, business executives, governors and legislators—stepped forward to join the struggle to fulfill America’s “promise” to its children. Failure to achieve the “twin goals of equity and high-quality schooling” would, the Commission warned, inevitably lead to “a generalized mediocrity in our society or the creation of an undemocratic elitism.” In the spring of 1983, the American zeitgeist was such that neither alternative was acceptable.

Transforming A Nation at Risk Into
A Nation Prepared

In moving forward to meet the challenges identified in A Nation at Risk, Carnegie Corporation of New York sought to engage many of the best and brightest talents in education, public service, business and the foundation world. The Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, established in January 1985 by the Corporation to explore the link between economic growth and a well-educated citizenry, quickly appointed an Advisory Council comprising prominent leaders in government, business, and education such as John W. Gardner, formerly U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and former president of Carnegie Corporation of New York; Lewis M. Branscomb, chief scientist and vice president of IBM Corporation; four-time governor of North Carolina James B. Hunt, Jr.; Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University; and Fred Hechinger, president of the New York Times Foundation.

The Advisory Council was swift to recognize, as Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, has observed, that “teaching is the profession upon which all professions rest,” and in March 1985, the Council recommended the creation of a Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. Its members, too, included many of the educational and political leaders of the day: Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association; governor of New Jersey Thomas H. Kean; and Governor Hunt.

A scant 14 months later, the Task Force issued its report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. The report reflected the creative ferment of the time—and called for sweeping changes in education policy. Concluding that “America’s ability to compete in world markets is eroding,” the Task Force emphasized that America’s “pursuit of excellence” could not be faint-hearted. Such a pursuit—the very foundation of economic growth—they said, would “[depend] on achieving far more demanding educational standards than we have ever attempted to reach before.”

Identifying the teaching profession as America’s “best hope” for achieving those standards, the Task Force called for the redesign and revitalization of the teaching profession. Accordingly, some of the Task Force’s recommendations are still working their way into America’s vastly complex and generally unruly educational “system.” For example, the Task Force recommended that a bachelors degree in the arts and sciences be a prerequisite for the professional study of teaching, i.e., that teachers have a broad base of knowledge as well as a specialty knowledge of the subject they teach. Iterations of this recommendation have appeared, and reappeared, in subsequent teacher education reform efforts in the years that followed, yet many children in America’s public schools are today still at risk of being taught math or science by a teacher who has no training in either subject—or who may have no training as a teacher at all.

The Task Force on Teaching as a Profession also recommended that schools of education develop a new professional curriculum that would focus on a systematic knowledge of teaching, one that would include internships and residencies in schools and culminate in a Master in Teaching degree.

Still another recommendation became the primary legacy of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession: the establishment of a national board for professional teaching standards. Such a board would award advanced certification for teachers based on the achievement of “high standards for what teachers need to know and be able to do.” Notably, the Task Force looked to the teaching profession itself to set the standards and to certify those teachers who met them. With support from Carnegie Corporation, the recommendation became a reality in 1987 with the establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).

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