the United States that came to be known collectively as the Excellence Movement. Within two years of the report, more than 300 state and national task forces had investigated the condition of public education in America. The United States Department of Education (1984) described the national response to A Nation at Risk as “nothing short of extraordinary” (p. 11), and Secretary of Education Terrell Bell reported with satisfaction that the arduous work of reform was “already bearing fruit” (p. 8).
The Excellence Movement offered a consistent direction for reform. But it was not a new direction. Schools simply needed to do MORE! Students needed to earn more credits for graduation in courses that were more rigorous and required more homework. Schools needed to add more days to the school year and lengthen the school day. Schools needed to test students more frequently and expect more of teachers both before offering employment and before extending tenure. The reforms of the Excellence Movement simply called for an intensification of existing practices. They contained no new ideas.
Five years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, President Reagan hosted a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the school-reform initiatives that the report had helped to launch. Edward Fiske, the former education editor of the New York Times, was among those in attendance. Fiske later wrote:
Leading politicians and educators, as well as those in the national media who cover education, used the occasion to reflect on the accomplishments of school reform. And we came to a startling conclusion: There weren’t any. (1992, p. 24)
The United States Department of Education ultimately came to the same conclusion. In 1990 the agency reported that “stagnation at relatively low levels appears to describe the level of performance of American students” (Alsalam & Ogle, 1990). As the disillusioned undersecretary of education wrote shortly after his resignation, “Despite all of the talk of reform, despite the investment of tons of billions of extra dollars, public education in the United States is still a failure. It is to our society what the Soviet economy is to theirs” (Finn, 1991, p. xiv).
The Unfulfilled Promises of the Restructuring Movement
The demise of the Excellence Movement prompted a new, two-pronged approach to school improvement. The first part of the strategy called for national educational goals and standards. In 1989 President George Bush convened the nation’s governors for a summit meeting on education—only the third time in the nation’s history that governors had been asked to meet to consider a single topic. (Theodore Roosevelt once called the governors together to discuss the environment; Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled them to discuss the economy.) The result of the Bush summit was the identification of “Goals 2000”—six national goals for education, which stipulated that by the year 2000:
1. All children in America will start school ready to learn;
2. The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%;
3. American students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy;
4. U.S. students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement;
5. Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; and
6. Every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment that is conducive to learning. (United States Department of Education, 1994)
Congress later amended this original list to include two more goals:
7. By the year 2000, the nation’s teaching force will have access to programs for the continued development of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.
8. By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.
In 1991, two years after the Bush summit, the National Center on Education and the Economy joined forces with the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh to design a national exam system. Then, in 1994, Congress created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council to review and endorse state and national standards. At about the same time, however, articulating national standards began to become an increasingly political activity. Critics asserted that the standards movement represented a federal takeover of the schools and an attempt to indoctrinate students to the liberal agenda. As a result, when the second Education Summit was held in 1996, the standards movement was transferred from the federal to the state governments, from the White House to the State House. Subsequently, the task of developing national standards was left to professional organizations and curriculum specialists.
While the movement to establish national educational goals and standards advanced, a parallel movement tried to give individual schools more freedom to develop the best methods to achieve those goals. The failure of the Excellence Movement had been widely attributed to the fact that it represented a “top-down” attempt to mandate improvement. Early reform initiatives had tended toward standardization, increased reliance on rules and regulations, and detailed specifications of school practices at the expense of local autonomy. Impetus for the movement had come from elected officials and business. Control was centered in state legislatures. Practitioners had become mere pawns in the movement, and the vast majority of the reform efforts had simply been imposed on them. Ultimately, the paired concepts of establishing national goals and providing local autonomy to achieve these goals seemed to offer a viable alternative to the failed Excellence Movement. National goals could address a national crisis, while job-site autonomy and individual empowerment seemed to be consistent with best practice in the private sector.
This new emphasis on site-based reform came to be known as the Restructuring Movement, a term used so widely and ambiguously that it soon lost any specific, universally understood meaning. Nevertheless, the director of the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools noted that comprehensive restructuring typically included some common features: site-based management with meaningful authority over staffing, program, and budget; shared decision making; staff teams with frequent, shared planning time and shared responsibility for student instruction; multi-year instructional or advisory groups; and heterogeneous grouping in core subjects (Newmann et al., 1996).
The Restructuring Movement engendered considerable optimism as it grew to become synonymous with school reform in the early 1990s. The term itself seemed to encompass more than mere innovation or improvement, suggesting instead a comprehensive redesign and systemic transformation of the schools. The simplistic, more-of-the-same approaches of earlier reform movements had apparently been replaced at last by a strategy based on a more realistic assumption: monumental changes were necessary if schools were to successfully respond to the enormous challenges before them.
Another reason the Restructuring Movement generated such hope was the expectation that educators would rush to embrace it. Not only would local educators have greater authority to initiate and oversee changes in their schools, but they would also be given the autonomy to organize and administer programs and facilities. Freed from the shackles of top-down mandates and bureaucratic rules and regulations, teachers and principals could respond creatively to the issues they faced. They could use their knowledge of pedagogy more fully and better serve their students and schools. Resources would be used more efficiently, professional collaboration would flourish,
