The Sandia Report and U.S. Achievement: An Assessment

Abstract

Abstract The author assesses the Sandia Report, a controversial analysis of U.S. education by the Sandia National Laboratories that challenges popular views of an educational decline. The report, titled "Perspectives on Education in America", was finally made public in the May/June 1993 issue of The Journal of Educational Research (Carson, Huelskamp, & Woodall, 1993). The assessment focuses on the Sandia Report's contentions about K through 12 performance, specifically the SAT decline, NAEP achievement, and the international assessments. The author concludes that the report is generally right about steady trends, but that it is seriously flawed by errors in analysis, insufficient evidence, mischarac-terizations of the international data, and a failure to consider the evidence that U.S students are performing at low levels. In spite of its findings, fundamental school reform is still warranted.