As Education Week marks its 20th anniversary, here are some of the people, events, and issues that were making news 20 years ago.
Selected stories from March 10, 1982:
The American Teacher: The National Education Association releases The Status of the American Public School Teacher, 1980-81, the sixth in a series of portraits of the public school teacher the nea has issued every five years since 1956. The report says the average teacher is older and has spent more time in college than was the case in 1976. The union also found that a teacher in 1981 was far less likely to choose teaching as a career if given a second chance than was the case five years earlier.
Fed Up: Superintendents are becoming increasingly frustrated with their boards, and that dissatisfaction is making the chiefs more likely to quit their jobs, according to a study presented at the American Association of School Administrators’ convention in New Orleans. The survey of more than 1,300 superintendents found that 15 percent of the respondents cited conflicts with their former school boards and the growing tendency of boards to be uncooperative as key reasons they left their previous jobs for their current positions.
Bigger Bucks: The legislature in Vermont, a state whose schools have been among the most reliant in the nation on local property taxes, appears ready to enact a bill that would boost state aid to schools by 50 percent. With state aid accounting for about 25 percent of the average district’s general operating revenues (excluding federal revenue), Vermont ranks 46th in the nation in state spending for schools.
Selective Closings?: The Maryland state board of education is asked to decide whether the Montgomery County school board’s selection of schools to be closed was intended to thwart intergration. Montgomery County, a Washington suburb, was one of the first and largest districts in the country to adopt an integration plan without having been ordered to do so.
Measuring Equity: To advance its goal of “making schools more responsive to the needs of women and girls,” the Council for Women in Independent Schools plans to devise a survey instrument, or “equity audit,” to help independent schools measure their progress in providing equity for their students and employees. The idea is to encourage schools to examine and correct disparities in the way they treat women and girls and men and boys.
Nuclear Knowledge:More than 220 teachers from Boston area meet on the Lesley College campus in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss “Educating for Responsibility in a Nuclear Age.” The meeting—believed by its sponsors to be the first of its kind in the country— was convened, organizers say, to help teachers examine their role in making students aware of the dangers and implications of the nuclear-arms race.
Historic Opposition: Rallying against the policies of a president for the first time in its 85-year history, the National PTA joins efforts of other advocacy groups to fight against the Reagan administration’s proposed fiscal 1983 education budget. “With 6 million grassroots members, this is an organization that Congress wants to hear from and can’t ignore,” says Mary Ann Leveridge, the association’s president.
