U.S. NATIONAL PROGRAMS TO INCREASE LITERACY IN THE EARLY 1990S

Abstract

This paper considers the impact of the US education reforms in the last decade of the twentieth century on the quality of primary and secondary education and adult literacy that they were meant to increase at the beginning of the new millennium. The author has revealed the part that the issue of literacy played in two education acts passed within the studied period: 1) «America 2000. An Education Strategy» (1991) and 2) «Goals 2000: Educate America Act» (1994). In this legislation, the country’s education goals were set anew: America was to become the leader in the world economy through developing skills and enhancing the competitiveness of its workforce. To verify the difference that the two acts made and to evaluate the efficiency of the US concept of education in the 1990s, the author has compared the results of international and American literacy assessment tests for students and adults for the period of 1992 to 2003: TIMSS 1995, PISA 2000 and 2003, and the 1992 and 2003 National Assessments of Adult Literacy. This analysis has shown that although progress in improving the literacy of the US population was made, the expected considerable change in education indicators was not demonstrated. However, the reforms allowed modernizing the school system and solving several problems: legislation was passed that empowered citizens to establish new schools different from the traditional state school; parents were granted the right to choose a school for their children; pre-school preparation and school safety were improved. The author concludes that there are three primary reasons for the failure of the education reforms in the 1990s in the US. First, the approach to solving education issues was excessively multidirectional. Second, education performance indicators (to lead in Mathematics and Science in the world at the school level, to meet the advanced level of skills in all basic subjects by all schoolchildren, for instance) were too ambitious. Third, the reform did not result in overhauling the structure of the institutions that influence the quality of school education. This proved that the crisis in the US education in the 1990s was not overblown. Realizing why the reforms were unsuccessful was key to planning further changes in the US education that proceeded in the 2000s, when the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 came into force.