A Nation At Risk

With notable vision, members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) decided that their report, A Nation At Risk (hereafter called ANAR), should be short. They meant it to be read by people who would not ordinarily read such a thing the public at large and they composed it accordingly: ten thousand words of text on 36 pamphlet-size pages unimpeded by footnotes and references. Add a title page and 25 pages of appendices and you get a 7” x 9”, 63-page educational blockbuster that was set off on April 26, 1983; the reverberations of the explosion persist to this day. Initially 40,000 copies were printed for distribution by the Department of Education and 2,000 more for sale by the Government Printing Office. It was a slight underestimate. Just 5 months later, in October 1984, the report was in its fourth printing and over 120,000 copies had been distributed. It was the fastest seller in recent GPO experience; more than 65,000 copies had been sold through the mail or from their bookstores and demand remained heavy. That wasn’t all; indeed it was the smallest of the circulation statistics. Over 400,000 copies of the report were duplicated and distributed by various organizations. For example, the American Association of School Administrators sent copies to its entire 18,000-person membership, the Association for Computing Machinery blanketed 63,000 of its members with copies and the Iowa State Department of Education distributed copies to 60,000 Iowans. The trade press, the Congressional Record, and daily newspapers across the land have printed the piece in its entirety. By conservative estimate we calculated that the text of ANAR reached the offices and breakfast tables of at least 4 million citizens, with no telling how many more people shared the same copy. The report has sparked debate and discussion of educational matters to a degree unheard since Sputnik. Within a few months after the release of the