Homeschooling; Immigration to Canada; Income
and wages in Canada; Literature in Canada; Minor-
ities in Canada; Nunavut Territory; Quebec referen-
dum of 1995; Television.
Education in the United States
Definition Policies, practices, and cultural trends
affecting academic instruction in the United
States, from preschool through graduate and
professional schools
The 1990’s was a period of great controversy, interest, and
scrutiny on the national, state, and local levels concerning
the quality of education in the nation’s elementar y and sec-
ondar y schools and in colleges and universities. It was
marked by arguments about educational improvement
through national goals and curricular content, account-
ability through performance standards and testing, and re-
vitalization through school reorganization, choice, and
teacher preparation.
The 1990’s opened with the inheritance of reports
and pronouncements from national, state, and local
leaders, political commentators, and some educa-
tors about a “crisis” in American education that had
begun with headlines from the National Commis-
sion on Excellence in Education 1983 report,ANa-
tion at Risk. The report proclaimed that education
was in a failure mode, that it was mediocre, and that
the country was in danger of losing ground interna-
tionally. This was followed by other reports and by a
1989 educational summit attended by President
George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors (led
by Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas). Con-
centrating primarily on lower education (elemen-
tary and secondary levels), the report called for a set
of goals to improve the quality and performance of
public schools to be implemented on the state and
local levels. Debates about the quality of higher edu-
cation were touched off with the publication of
Allan Bloom’s much-citedThe Closing of the American
Mind(1987), which lamented the state of the acad-
emy and the quality of education and looked with
nostalgia to an earlier era. These types of pro-
nouncements and developments set the stage for
more books, studies, and commentaries during the
1990’s about the status of education in American so-
ciety and the various reform efforts in the political
and academic arenas to revitalize education.
Curricular Content and National Character Curric-
ular content, particularly in fields such as history, be-
came a heated issue, especially as it related to con-
ceptions of the American character or identity, with
a multicultural approach versus a Eurocentric ap-
proach to varying degrees. New scholarship, espe-
cially the new social history, had embraced the story
and inclusion of people of color, women, immi-
grants, labor, and other marginalized groups, as well
as an increasingly global economy, developments of
non-Western cultures, and world history. Studies by
scholars in the higher education arena included
work concerning issues of race, class, gender, and
ethnicity and were being incorporated in some texts
and in the curriculum. Those that opposed this ap-
proach (primarily political conservatives, but some
with more liberal inclinations) stated that such an
interpretive framework, which might be carried to
an extreme, slighted the significance and impor-
tance of the West and European culture to the Amer-
ican story and had the potential to encourage divi-
siveness rather than assimilation.
This controversy in the educational arena came
into sharp focus with the attempt to develop volun-
tary national standards for the teaching of history in
the schools in the 1992-1996 period. The proposed
standards that were developed by a group of histori-
ans and educators became embroiled in heated de-
bate. In 1994, even before official publication, they
were denounced by conservative critics as unpatri-
otic and unlike the history that they were taught in
schools. The standards, which incorporated some of
the interpretative frameworks from the new social
history, were denounced in 1995 by a vote of 99-1 in
the Senate. The proposed standards were revised in
1996 with the input of various groups. Subsequently,
some states utilized the guidelines or accompanying
lessons. There was an additional issue of debate on
the high school level, with critiques about the com-
prehensive high school and the differentiated cur-
riculum, where some students took courses that
were criticized as not being rigorous or were placed
into nonacademic general tracks.
The debate about curricular content accelerated
on the higher education level as well. Publications
and commentaries ranged from criticism of colleges
and universities for a de-emphasis on the culture of
the West and a growing array of non-Western
courses, to a critique of areas such as women’s stud-
ies and black studies that were termed by critics asThe Nineties in America Education in the United States 287