At 4.20pm on 26 April 1983, in the state dining room at the White House, then president Ronald Reagan accepted a report from a panel of the country’s leading educators, offered a couple of lighthearted quips and spoke of a school system in “the grip of a crisis”. It was the Sputnik moment of American education, a visceral warning about a global superpower falling behind its rivals.

The report, A Nation at Risk, sounded the alarm about the quality of American schools and the potential for looming disaster. “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it said.

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The expression of angst, amplified by the media and Reagan in public hearings around the US, is described by Dana Goldstein’s book, The Teacher Wars, as one of the most influential federal documents ever published. It had some positive outcomes, such as securing the future of the education department despite Reagan’s 1980 campaign promise to abolish it. But in creating a narrative of failure, it arguably led to a generational cycle of blaming and underpaying teachers that puts the current shortcomings of the Trump administration into perspective.

Jonathan Kozol, a veteran activist who started his teaching career in 1964 and is the author of several major books about public education, says: “In many states, teachers often have to work two jobs to lead an even marginal middle class existence, working for Uber on weekends or at night and dipping into their own salaries to buy basic school supplies. Now, Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump have certainly made the lot of kids and teachers even worse. But Trump has simply put a sinister and ugly face on contemptible conditions that existed long before he came to office. I’d like to blame him for the evils of the world, but this has been a pattern from long before.”

Recalling the Reagan-era report, Kozol continues: “A Nation at Risk alleged that our schools were flooded with ‘a tide of mediocrity’ and the culprits were teachers. That was the theme. Teachers were accused of being too permissive with children. That was partly a conservative reaction to the progressive values of the 60s. Teachers were ‘lazy, in terms of pay they were self-serving, they had their summers free so they didn’t have to work that hard’. The most unjust blame was the one placed on the teacher unions.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reagan’s seminal report on US education alleged ‘our schools were flooded with ‘a tide of mediocrity’ and the culprits were teachers’. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Kozol came to regard Reagan’s education secretary, Bill Bennett, as “a big-time bully”. In 1988, Sandra Feldman, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, offered her view of Bennett in a New York Times interview: “What came through was a disdain for the profession. And people with low self-esteem themselves aren’t in a position to raise the self-esteem of children.’’

Emboldened, conservative thinktanks started to demand a “get tough” approach to teachers and students. Then came former president George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan 2002 law that compelled states to test students annually in maths and reading and sanction schools that failed to meet targets.

Kozol describes the culture: “No excuses no matter how poor the kids, no excuses for the teachers if they can’t pump the test scores two percentage points this year. The other part of the George W Bush solution was opening the way to charter schools [public schools run by outside groups], which hired untrained teachers on the cheap: typically bright young college grads who were willing to do this for a couple of years before they went to business school.

“This was a way of deprofessionalising teaching because it implied anyone can do it if you’re smart and went to Yale or Princeton. The charter schools became a juggernaut and non-union for the most part, and meanwhile charter schools that had problems with kids would just kick them out and send them back to public schools. So the teachers back in the public schools had a harder time than ever.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bush ‘unleashed an almost religious faith in market forces and a broad assault on trade unions’. Photograph: Brooks Kraft/Corbis via Getty Images

Like Margaret Thatcher had in Britain, Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush had unleashed an almost religious faith in market forces and a broad assault on trade unions, teachers included. In 2004, then education secretary Roderick Paige described the National Education Association, the country’s biggest teachers’ union, as a “terrorist organisation” for opposing No Child Left Behind; he later apologised.

Scott Sargrad, managing director of K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington, says: “Reagan really had that approach of trying to break up the unions and pushing for tax cuts and deregulation. That came down from the very top and I think that’s around the time also you see what’s essentially been a 30-year effort on the conservative side to attack public sector unions and embrace tax cuts and deregulation.

“In Wisconsin in 2011, when Governor Scott Walker passed Act 10, it really decimated the teachers unions and public sector unions there and it ended up only a couple of years later with huge cuts in teacher pay and benefits.”

Along with Wisconsin, states such as Indiana, Massachusetts and Ohio weakened teachers’ collective bargaining rights. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, takes issue with what she calls the “hard-right monetise and privatise everything Milton Friedman Koch brothers DeVos part of the conservative market-based group” which thought it best to “systematise or robotise or reduce teachers to algorithms and students to test scores”.

Even Democratic president Barack Obama failed to turn the situation around. In 2009, he said: “It’s time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones.” His Race to the Top initiative offered $4.35bn to hard-up states to embrace policies such as expanding charter schools and linking test scores to teacher evaluations. Weingarten continues: “This set of changes turned out to be terrible because they were about basically using test scores as opposed to teacher judgment and children’s needs as the controlling feature for virtually every decision that was made in schools.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Obama: ‘It’s time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones.’ Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“The unions, of course, had to become the bogeyman because we were the ones saying: ‘Wait a second, we actually need funding for kids. We are the canary in the coal mine saying you can’t do it this way.’”

All these trends were compounded by the 2008-09 financial crisis, which offered an excuse to drastically cut school funding and freeze teacher salaries. When the economy recovered, the funding and salaries were not necessarily restored, or at least not at the same rate as other professions. Critics say Republican-controlled states in particular prioritised tax cuts over public education.

Indeed, there are wild discrepancies across the 50 states, each of which have their own school funding approaches and rules. Patricia Levesque, chief executive of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and former deputy chief of staff of education to Florida governor Jeb Bush, observes: “What happens in Florida on teacher pay is very different from in other states where they can directly put funding into it. In Florida, your mechanism is to provide increases in the public school budget and then it gets collectively bargained locally on how many teachers get hired, what’s their pay.”

A generation after A Nation at Risk, this makes centralised, instant solutions to the undervaluing of teachers, and the unique scrutiny their profession faces, tortuously difficult.

Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, argues: “We cannot rely on states to fund education on their own or even allow for collective bargaining in many states. So I think that the federal government has to step in and provide some real financial leverage in order to raise the number of teachers, raise the job quality for teachers and raise, even if it’s nonteaching jobs, the positions that have been eliminated, particularly in two-year colleges but across the education system.”

The first step? “More money, I would say,” Huelsman replies. “It’s very simple to say, but I think sometime the simple answer is the obvious answer.”