This year saw a major happening in the world of education--the appearance of reports that have placed education at the top of the national agenda. For a long period of time we thought this could never happen again. After all, the birth rate went down. And the percent of the voting public who are parents dropped from 50 percent or 60 percent to somewhere around 20 percent. Public concern focused on senior citizens or Social Security, and education somehow moved to the background.

But today education is one of the top two issues, second only to the economic and unemployment question, on the national agenda. All national polls how that your next president of the United States and next Congress will be elected on the basis of educational issues.

And there have been not one but a series of reports: the National Commission of Excellence, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Educational Commission of the States, and some others about to come out on high schools. By the time the year is over we may very well have 15 or 20 national reports all saying much the same thing. They point in the same direction. They move the emphasis to excellence and to quality. They talk about things that we have been talking about for a long, long time. And they discuss a few things that we haven’t been talking about, at least we haven’t favored.

They talk about tests--testing teachers, testing students. They talk about a tough curriculum instead of soft courses and electives that don’t have very substantial content. They talk about doing something about discipline problems in school. They talk about major investments of money in education. They talk about policies involving promotion of students and the graduation of students from schools. They talk about changing the nature of rewards for teachers. They all talk about finding some method to deal with the problem of dismissing incompetent teachers.

Another thing to see about these reports is that they reject tuition tax credits and vouchers either implicitly or explicitly.

Many people think this is just one of those fads. Every once in a while the country gets interested in something and you hear people saying, "Well, the country cannot focus its attention for more than a week or a month, or two months or five months. This will all go away."

I don’t believe that it will. There are, of course, political, social, economic, and religious fads. They do come and they do go. But a fad is generally based on something that is not rooted in a real problem. But what we face in education is certainly very real. Our problem is similar to the one we faced several years ago when all of a sudden we discovered that we had not been rebuilding our auto plants, our steel plants, and our prior industrial capacity. Reindustrialization was a problem. We had to reinvest, reindustrialize because otherwise we weren’t going to compete with the rest of the world and our own standard of living would decline.

Then, after reindustrialization, we discovered something else. Not only did our private industry have to be rebuilt, but our public infrastructure was falling apart--roads, bridges, water and sewer systems; our railroad system, harbors, docks and so forth.

Again, in large concentration, these are things that don’t go away. If you don’t rebuild plants, just thinking about it doesn’t make the problem go away. It gets worse and worse. If you don’t rebuild the bridges, that problem doesn’t go away.

Now, we have found that neglect in education and neglect of human resources is having and will have exactly the same disastrous effect as neglect did in the area of private industry and the area of public infrastructure. So this is not something that will go away.

I like the phrase "a nation at risk" because those words put education on the same par as national defense. A nation at risk means that a country can go down. It can fall apart. We can lose it. It can disappear. Those are strong words, and they are good words. This is a period of great danger, and it is a period of unprecedented opportunity. To realize that opportunity, two things must happen if we are to turn education around and make it work.

First, you need a program that focuses on quality. You can’t just keep doing the same things that have proven unsuccessful.

Second, as we move in the months ahead, we must be sure that the public doesn’t see teacher unions and collective bargaining as an obstacle to the improvement of education.

We must show a willingness to move far in the direction of these reports, cooperatively and eagerly, because we stand a great chance that these powerful report sponsors will say, yes, the nation is at risk, we were willing to spend a lot of money and we want to make a lot of changes, but you know, it is hopeless because we came up against inflexible unions, school boards, and administrators. If these leaders of government and industry, after having invested time, effort and prestige on a program to rebuild. American education, find their efforts frustrated, there is no question as to where the tilt of public policy will go. We will lose the support that we now have. There will be a massive move to try something else, and it will all be over.

The American Federation of Teachers is in a very fortunate position. We don’t have to sit here and rethink our position on whether our students should be tested. We don’t have to rethink whether a teacher coming in who is going to be a math teacher should be able to pass a math test or a language teacher, a language test. We don’t have to rethink whether we want a tough program geared toward doing something about disciplinary problems. On almost every program put on the agenda, the American Federation of Teachers was there 20 or 30 years ago working on the problem.

And so I am here to say that even on issue that we feel uncomfortable with, that we disagree with rather strongly, we have to ask ourselves: What are the consequences if we win the fight? What is the price? Is it worth it?

In a period of great turmoil and sweeping changes, those individuals and organizations that are mired in what seems to the public to be petty interests are going to be swept away in the larger movements. Those organizations and individuals who are willing and able to participate, to compromise, and to talk will not be swept away. On the contrary, they will shape the directions of all the reforms and changes that are about to be made. That is what we in the AFT intend to do. We intend to be on board shaping the direction of every change in education. [Applause]

The stakes are not just education, the stakes are certainly not just union. The stakes are the future of the country, and I know this union will rise to the challenge. [Applause]

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