Content area
Full Text
The U.S. Department of Education, in its 1983 report A Nation at Risk, declared that the U.S. public school system was failing so badly that it posed a threat to our national well-being. Since the report's release, almost every aspect of education has been a target of reform.
As a result, the past 14 years have witnessed (1) changes in the curricular requirements in almost every state, (2) development of national educational goals and national standards for evaluating student competency in various subjects, (3) programs for setting professional standards for teachers, (4) numerous efforts to restructure schools, and (5) experiments aimed at privatizing public schools or allowing parents to select the schools that their children will attend.
Though these innovations have been somewhat scattershot, sending education down several different reform paths, there have been some positive changes.
Students' scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) have rebounded after bottoming out in 1980-1981. Some other indicators of achievement-for example, scores in math and science for standardized tests-are also improving. Minorities have begun to close the gap with whites on some indicators-for instance, they have gained as many as 20 points on the SAT.2
Nevertheless, to paraphrase the immortal Anonymous: When all is said and done, more has been said than done in reforming our public school system. As a consequence, our schools-particularly some urban schools-remain at risk. And even in schools generally regarded as good, most observers fail to detect the level of achievement they believe is necessary to prepare students to enter an increasingly competitive world. As Diane Ravitch, a former official at the U.S. Department of Education and now a researcher at the Hudson Institute, puts it:
It is not good enough to assert that the schools educate as well today as they did in 1970, because many students...were poorly educated in 1970. That standard of performance was not good enough in 1970, and it should not be good enough a generation later....The challenge today is to educate the entire rising generation and to educate it at least as well as its peers.3
REFORM'S SLOW PACE
There are many explanations for the slow pace of reform. The educational system is large, cumbersome, and diffuse, complicating even the most wellfocused reform efforts. Many interests,...