These are the children who most need a broad curriculum, as well as further gains in math andВ reading. This distortion of the historical breadth of American public school goals has been most pronounced for minority and other disadvantaged children. The trend is most notable since the enactment of NCLB, as schools have diminished attention to history, civics, the sciences, art, music, physical education, character development, and social skills, to make more instructional time available for test preparation in math and reading. Perhaps the greatest damage has been done by narrowing the curriculum in an effort to boost math and reading test scores. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American studentsвЂ™ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. Not thinking that President ReaganвЂ™s rule (вЂњif it ainвЂ™t broke, donвЂ™t fix itвЂќ) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law ofВ 2002. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. None of this, however, supports the decline thesis of A Nation at Risk.Д«ecause of the reportвЂ™s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements - the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more ofВ it?ДЄ belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. For blacks, reading performance is better, but not nearly as much better as inВ math. For whites, reading performance is not substantially better now than in 1978, at the fourth, eighth, or twelfth grade levels. The continued gap is due to substantial improvement in white scores asВ well.Д®ighth grade math scores have also increased since 1978, although not by as much for twelfth graders, white scores have been stagnant, while black scores had a big increase from 1982 to 1990, and have been stagnantВ since.

In other words, if white math achievement had been stagnant, the black-white achievement gap would have been entirely closed. Indeed as the figure below shows, for black students, the improvement has been so dramatic that black fourth grade math scores today are now higher than white fourth grade scores in 1978. But the rise has certainly continued subsequent to 1983. This trend might not yet have been fully understood by Risk commission members - they might have concluded that the upturn then barely detectable would be short-lived. In elementary and middle school math, average scores rose for both black and white students, starting in the late 1970s. Trend scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also show a more complex picture than Risk described.

By 1983, the demographic composition of SAT test takers had mostly stabilized, and average SAT scores were again rising, notВ declining. But much of the decline had been due to the changing composition of SAT test takers - in the early 1960s, the preponderance of SAT test takers were high school students planning to apply to the most selective colleges. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nationвЂ™s other social and economic institutions forВ learning.ДЄs to student achievement: A Nation at Risk based its analysis of declining student achievement entirely on average SAT scores which had dropped by about half a standard deviation from 1963 to 1980. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining.

In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm thanВ good.

At risk excel student