Topic: A Nation at Risk

A Nation at Risk was a rhetorically powerful document; several aspects of that power are understudied:

• its dominant metaphor is of military threat, but it calls forth the threat to argue for economic competitiveness
• and there's painfully thin, or painfully bad, evidence either supporting its claims or showing the causal links between its claims and its warrants
• note that just as it comes out--1983--America starts the personal computer revolution--led by young graduates and dropouts (i.e., the products of this failing school system)--that leads to the longest economic expansion in history...and still the school system gets no credit for that.
• its recommendations weren't particularly revolutionary and were already in place in many places, so its rhetoric and its actual policy prescriptions were pretty divorced
• it convinced many people to get on board with it, despite not necessarily agreeing with its premise, methodologies, or conclusions--in the hope that bringing such attention to education would yield good results (i.e., how did so many people get conned?)
• it gained mainstream media attention in a way few government reports have
• that media attention was overwhelmingly positive, while the professional response was overwhelmingly negative--yet that professional response got almost no media attention
• it really helped to move the debate about the appropriate sphere of education to one where education's role was to maintain America's global economic competitiveness, a place it hasn't shifted from for 25 years