Still at Risk

That wasn't good enough "A Nation at Risk" declared. The changing nature of work required public schools to teach all students to high standards through high school. And because the nation by then no longer lived in official innocence of race and class, all students included those who in the past had been largely excluded from the nation's educational equation: students of color, English-language learners and the disabled. So "A Nation at Risk" was not merely a school-reform manifesto. It sought, in effect, a new, far more ambitious role for public education, one that would redefine the social landscape in America by giving all students the same educational opportunities. It's not surprising, given the magnitude of that challenge, that a quarter of a century later we haven't yet made good on the report's promise.

"A Nation at Risk" and the other schooling manifestos of the day mostly sought regulatory reforms to strengthen teacher quality, ratchet up high-school standards, and measure student performance more rigorously. A wing of the reform movement countered the student apathy and alienation spawned by the nation's vast, dysfunctional comprehensive high schools by reconfiguring them into smaller, more personal places where students and teachers established meaningful relationships, a strategy rekindled in recent years by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But by the end of the 1980s, striking percentages of students continued to perform at alarmingly low levels. And it was increasingly clear that local educators were not buying the notion that many students could, or even should, study at higher levels.

So state and federal policymakers, including presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, began putting pressure on the schools from the outside, establishing state education standards and national educational goals, requiring more student testing and holding educators responsible for the results—an accountability campaign that culminated in George W. Bush's signing of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002.

Conservatives, who had swept into national leadership during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, had another solution: the marketplace. Reagan declared competition between public and private schools to be the best remedy for what ailed public education and sought to disperse billions of dollars in federal education aid through vouchers redeemable at either type of school. Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress balked, and today only about 150,000 of the nation's 50 million students are enrolled in a handful of voucher programs around the country. But another alternative to traditional public schools, publicly funded but independently operated charter schools, sprang up in the early 1990s as an alternative to voucher programs. Today, they enroll more than a million students, and in some cities, including Washington, D.C., they educate upward of a third of all public-school kids.
 
Still, 25 years worth of reform has produced only modest gains. NCLB has forced educators to pay attention to long-neglected groups of students, but it has also encouraged states to set the academic bar so low that even if students meet state standards required by the law, they are going to be only minimally educated. And the law has arguably done more harm than good for the millions of students who need to be pushed beyond the basics. Some charter schools have done fabulous work with the nation's toughest-to-educate students, but they are struggling to replicate their success, while many other charter schools have proven to be no better than traditional public schools and in some cases worse. Organizations like Teach for America have infused a measure of talent and energy into public education, but the barriers to improving the teaching profession decried by reform manifestos of the 1980s remain.

The authors of "A Nation at Risk" called for all students to study the New Basics, a core curriculum of rigorous high-school subjects, and since then enrollment in Advanced Placement courses has expanded from 135,000 to nearly 1.5 million, while the number of schools using the demanding International Baccalaureate curriculum has increased from a few dozen to nearly 1,300. But 12th-grade reading and math scores have stagnated since the early 1990s on the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable national report card of student achievement. And by some calculations, upward of half the nation's black and Latino students fail to graduate from high school.

We have pulled up performance at the bottom and begun to close the gaps between minority students and their white and Asian counterparts, NAEP and other measures suggest. But we're far from reaching "A Nation at Risk'"s goal of significantly higher average achievement. And that task is only going to get tougher as the public-school population becomes more challenging. The nation's Latino population, for example, is expected to double by 2050, accounting for most of the country's population growth, and, as their gloomy graduation rates suggest, many Latino students struggle in public schools.