Volume 31, Number 6 · April 12, 1984
The Schools Flunk Out
By Andrew Hacker
A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future
by John I. Goodlad
McGraw-Hill, 396 pp., $18.95
Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School
by Theodore R. Sizer
Houghton Mifflin, 241 pp., $16.95
High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America
by Ernest L. Boyer
Harper and Row, 363 pp., $15.00
High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared
by James S. Coleman, by Thomas Hoffer, by Sally Kilgore
Basic Books, 289 pp., $20.75
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform
National Commission on Excellence in Education
US Government Printing Office, 65 pp., $4.50
Action for Excellence
Task Force on Education for Economic Growth
Education Commission of the States, 50 pp., $5.00
Making the Grade Education Policy, background paper by
Task Force on Federal Elementary and Secondary Paul E. Peterson
Twentieth Century Fund, 174 pp., $6.00
Educating Americans for the 21st Century Mathematics, Science and Technology
National Science Board Commission on Precollege Education in
National Science Foundation, two volumes: 124 and 251 pp., available without charge
Having been through the mill ourselves, we all feel entitled to expound on education. So, too, we believe that the schools belong to us, and hence we have the right to set them straight. The past year has been one for sounding alarms, mainly by a number of task forces and commissions, titles taken by committees to suggest vital issues are at stake. The National Commission on Excellence in Education, appointed by Secretary of Education T.H. Bell, set the general tone. Its report, A Nation at Risk, opened with the now familiar warning that 'the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.' The Education Commission of the States, created to counsel governors, released its report, Action for Excellence, 'with an unusual sense of urgency,' because 'a real emergency is upon us.' The Twentieth Century Fund followed with Making the Grade, which forecast 'disaster' unless we make 'a national commitment to excellence in our public schools.' And the National Science Board's Educating Americans for the 21st Century called for 'academic excellence by 1995.' Something must be in the air, when four independent panels choose 'excellence' as their common denominator.
Review, 7698 words
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