Pioneer High School

• From the publication of the landmark A Nation at Risk report on education in 1983 to the polarizing election of Donald Trump, one moment after another has been compared to the sputnik episode.
• As a professor who studies the rhetoric of education reform, I know that what politicians and others call sputnik moments do not always live up to that name.
• Some sputnik moments spark enduring public debates, while others are easily forgotten.

American education called into question

• In the spring of 1958, Life magazine ran a series of articles entitled: “Crisis in Education.” One Life article compared the rigor of U.S. education unfavorably with that of the Soviets.
• Another Life article referred to American education as a “carnival.” President Dwight Eisenhower read the Life articles and began advocating for what would become the National Defense Education Act of 1958.
• It was a first-of-its-kind intervention in education policy and funding.
• Ever since, pivotal events for education in the U.S. have been called sputnik moments.

Reagan and a flailing education system

• In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk.
• We responded by making math, science, and engineering education a priority.” Reagan cited NASA’s space shuttle program as evidence that the nation had succeeded.
• But like sputnik, it spurred decades of discussion about the rigor of public education in the U.S.

Obama on competition with China

• Obama needed to sell his proposal to the nation and to the House of Representatives, which the Republicans had taken control of in the 2010 midterm elections.
• It also did not result in the creation of an Advanced Research Projects Agency for education.

Donald Trump’s election

• Sure enough, Trump’s election did revitalize the national discussion of civic education.
• There was also the Civic Learning for a Democracy in Crisis by the Hastings Center.
• Even the Trump administration joined in the conversation with its 1776 report, which called for a patriotic form of civic education.

Why do we have sputnik moments?

• Sputnik moments can be spontaneous or constructed through rhetoric after the fact, or they can fall somewhere in between.
• In the late 1950s, critics of American education made the most of their moment by demanding a greater emphasis on math, science and language.
• Because they capitalized on their moment, policymakers and education reformers have continued to be vigilant for more moments like sputnik ever since.