Word: sputniked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that isolated from the country's business. Foe McCarthy and the Justice Department were hounding Harvard professors who refused to tell Congress about the political activities of their colleagues. Harvard students helped organize a protest rally at Fancuil Hall when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising. And when Sputnik went up, several Crimson editors had front row seats for the nation's embarrassment: the center of the embryonic US tracking system was at Harvard, but when the Russian satellite began bleeping through space, the center's electronic gear, communications equipment, even its desks, were still waiting to be uncrated...
...attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge...
...evidence of decline was depressingly easy to find. About 13% of all 17-year-olds, and perhaps 40% of minority youth, are considered functionally illiterate. In 19 academic achievement tests given in 21 nations, American students never finished first or second and were last seven times. Before Sputnik launched a paroxysm of educational reform in 1957, average test scores were actually higher than they are now. From 1963 to 1980, the average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests fell more than 50 points in verbal skills (to 424 out of 800) and 36 points in math (to 466). And there...
...president said that he is optimistic that these changes combined with a new "gathering consensus to get behind public schools," will help reorder U.S. educational priorities, similar to what occurred after the Russians launched the Sputnik space satellite...
...Governor James Hunt of North Carolina and Dr. David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corporation, assembled a blue-ribbon panel of 50 business, education and government leaders. Last week the coalition issued a report declaring that the present economic challenge from Japan and other countries is "more profound than Sputnik." The Federal Government, the group insists, must take the leadership to provide an educational system that meets the needs of our technological economy. Concludes the report: "The failure to attend to our educational system is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament...