How to Fix America's Schools

If you take it for more than a political slogan, President Bush's motto for education reform--"no child left behind"--is a wildly ambitious goal. It is every bit as audacious as Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty or John F. Kennedy's race to the moon. Since the U.S. first embraced universal public education decades ago, there has been a largely unspoken assumption that some children will never earn a high school degree. Now, says National Urban League President Hugh B. Price, Bush is "asking our schools to do something that no society has ever done, to educate all children well, regardless of their circumstances." In effect, Bush is declaring that in the Information Age, a solid education is a fundamental civil right. The President's pronouncement is the culmination of nearly twenty years of mounting efforts to fix America's schools. The educational crusade began in earnest with A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report commissioned by the Reagan Administration warning that "a rising tide of mediocrity [in our schools] threatens our very future as a nation." In 1989, then-President George Bush and the nation's governors held the first-ever national education summit, where they set sweeping goals--from eliminating illiteracy to vaulting U.S. students to No. 1 in the world in math and science.

There has been scant progress toward meeting those goals (tables). Less than half of America's schoolchildren read proficiently at their grade level. U.S. 12th-graders still score well below teenagers in almost every other developed country on mathematics and science tests. The 74% of students who have completed high school by the age of 18 rank the U.S. No. 17 in graduation rates after decades of leading the world, according to the Education Trust, a research group in Washington. "While we've certainly made some improvements, they're not nearly enough to keep up," says Milt Goldberg, who headed the commission that produced A Nation at Risk.