A nation still at risk?

Published: April 26, 2008, 7:00 am

by Matthew Hay Brown Today is the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the blue-ribbon study commissioned by the Reagan administration that sounded alarms about the state of the U.S. education system. "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," one oft-cited passage warned. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Issued in the midst of the Cold War, and at a moment when America's economic dominance appeared to under threat by a rising Japan, it was the report that launched a thousand school reform programs. "The most important legacy of 'A Nation at Risk' was to put the quality of education on the national political agenda - where it has remained ever since," Edward B. Fiske writes in The New York Times. "The last 25 years have

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