My post today at WHYY’s Newsworks notes the 30th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk” and how it continues to inform our education reform debate:

To give you a taste of the document, here’s a line from the introduction: “If an unfriendly 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.”

Not much nuance there, but a lot of clout. Over the last 30 years Americans have gradually accepted the premise of “A Nation at Risk” and many agree that our system of public education needs to be reformed. That’s a huge change in perception, especially for a system so resistant to change: remember, schools in America still follow an agrarian calendar and most classrooms look no different than school houses in the 19th century, 25 kids or so with a teacher in the front, modeled after schools that Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843.

But how much change is too much? When does the urgency of reform undermine the principles of sound educational practice? Is this brave new system becoming too focused on student test data at the expense of critical thinking skills?

Read the rest here.