A photograph hangs on the wall of T.H. Bell's office commemorating the day in 1983 he presented "A Nation at Risk," his scathing report on the decline of education in America.
In the photo, Bell, then the U.S. education secretary, is sitting in the Oval Office with then-President Ronald Reagan, top Reagan aide Ed Meese and Vice President George Bush.Reagan's inscription on the photo reads, "We have the report, but why are we smiling?"
Since retired from public service, Bell continues to pursue national educational reform from his base in downtown Salt Lake City. And he still smiles about the day he shocked the nation out of its post-World War II complacency.
Completed by a committee Bell empaneled in an end-run around Meese, "A Nation at Risk" was a hard-nosed appraisal of public education that concluded schools were wallowing in a "rising tide of mediocrity."
The national response to Bell's call for longer school days and more rigorous math and science instruction was overwhelming. Not since the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 had there been such an uproar over the deterioration of educational standards in this country.
The furor was a triumph for Bell, named the nation's second U.S. secretary of education in 1981 with orders to dismantle an agency that had been created just two years earlier by the Carter administration. Bell may have failed in his mission to close up shop, but he succeeded in stimulating national concern.
Now 72, Bell runs Terrel Bell and Associates with Donna L. Elmquist and Elam Hertzler. Elmquist and Bell co-authored "How To Shape Up Our Nation's Schools," a follow-up to "A Nation at Risk," and Hertzler was Bell's chief of staff when he was education secretary.
From first to last, Bell has been an educator. Named superintendent of schools in Rockland, Idaho, at 25, he later held the same position with districts in Afton, Wyo., and Ogden.
Bell became Utah's state schools chief in 1963, a post he held until 1970. He then began his on-again, off-again career as a federal educator, moving back and forth between Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City. He served as U.S. commissioner of education under presidents Nixon and Ford.
By the time Reagan tapped him to dispatch the Department of Education, Bell knew he wanted to complete a comprehensive study of an education system he believed had declined steadily since 1950.
He wanted Reagan to appoint a presidential commission to complete the report. But Meese, who accused Congress of creating the Department of Education to "do mischief on the children of America," persuaded Reagan not to attach his office to the pursuit.
So Bell handpicked his own National Commission on Excellence in Education. The commission's disparagement of school performance in the late 1970s, in comparison with the half-decade that followed World War II, pushed education to the top of the public agenda, if not Reagan's.
Bell left the Reagan Cabinet in 1985. After the 1991 publication of "How To Shape Up Our Nation's Schools," his nonprofit consultant group contracted with school districts in 16 cities, including Baltimore, Miami, Kansas City, Salt Lake City and New York, to run the National Academic League. The motivational program for middle schools promotes academic excellence through competition patterned after athletics.
Bell's group also is helping the Salt Lake City School District prepare Bennion Elementary to become a high-tech showpiece. When it opens in the fall, the school will boast a computer for every three students, who will set their own academic pace. Teachers will be freed from "chalk and talk" lessons that, because they are aimed at the broad middle, leave slower students behind and bore the brightest to tears.
The two endeavors are examples of what Bell believes are central to school reform in the 1990s: motivation and technology.
It's time, he says, that academics get the same support given to athletics. And computers offer a less expensive alternative to building more schools.
"We can't afford to get our class size down to 12 or 15," he said. "It's just too expensive."
Key to the success of the computerized classroom is intensive teacher training. "We give our supermarket checkers more high-tech support than we give our teachers," Bell said.
He is an enthusiastic supporter of national education reforms that Secretary of Education Richard Riley has proposed. Bell also says Gov. Mike Leavitt's proposal to hook up rural schools to the state's urban centers via computer is "right on the mark."
Under Riley, the Department of Education has implemented reforms to make itself more accountable and is pushing a plan to route more of the $10 billion it spends each year on elementary and high-school education to the neediest schools. Aides insist the 1980s debate over whether to abolish the agency is dead, and at a time when President Clinton is ordering cutbacks elsewhere, Education has added 500 staffers.
Bell has defended the rights of students not to read controversial novels, advocated merit pay for teachers, scuttled a Carter administration bilingual education plan and called himself "a lifetime conservative and Republican" comfortable with the philosophy of the Reagan administration.
Nevertheless, he thinks Riley is doing a bang-up job.
"I was delighted when Clinton picked him," Bell said. "I think he's right on the mark. I suppose an old, white-haired Republican like me could be criticized for that."
He pauses, and smiles.
"There are times I wish I had another 20 years," he says. "But who knows? No need to retire."