Schools: Recommended Reading: Other Sources: Booklist: Our Schools & Our Future ...are we still at risk?

Our Schools & Our Future ...are we still at risk?

Edited by Paul E. Peterson
Hoover Institution, February 2003

This book is an assessment by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

From their website:

The Koret Task Force on K–12 Education is a top-rate team of education experts brought together by the Hoover Institution, with the support of the Koret Foundation, to work on education reform. The primary objectives of the task force are to gather, evaluate, and disseminate existing evidence in an analytical context, and analyze reform measures that will enhance the quality and productivity of K–12 education. Click here to visit the Koret Task Force website.

Book Description:

The legacy of National Commission on Excellence in Education: much activity, but little improvement

Twenty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education delivered a shocking report called A Nation at Risk, which awakened millions of Americans to a national crisis in primary and secondary education. But today, while reverberations from that report are still being felt, solid and conclusive reforms in American primary and secondary education remain elusive. Why?

In Our Schools and Our Future, the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education looks at the response to the commission's report and analyzes why it produced so much activity and so little improvement. Among their findings, the members of the task force reveal how many bold reform proposals have been implemented in limited and piecemeal fashion. They conclude that fundamental changes are needed in the incentive structure and power relationships of schooling itself and offer recommendations based in three core principles: accountability, choice, and transparency.

Accountability, they explain, will mean that everyone in the system will know what results are expected, how they will be measured, and what will happen if results are not attained. Choice will bring freedom, diversity, and innovation. Transparency will yield the information needed to assure both top-down accountability and a viable marketplace of methods and ideas. The results of these three taken together, they assert, will be a reinvigorated yet very different system that will rekindle Americans' confidence in public education.

"When A Nation at Risk was published 20 years ago, it was seen as something of the Peyton Place of education reports: It stunned the establishment, readers threw up their hands and proclaimed themselves shocked by it, but no one could tear themselves away from reading it. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the original report, the Koret Task Force tells a no less compelling story." --Lisa Graham Keegan, Chief Executive Officer, Education Leaders Council

"The thoughtfulness of Our Schools and Our Future: . . . Are We Still at Risk? is much to the task force's credit. For one who was 'present at the creation,' revisiting A Nation at Risk in such distinguished company is . . . satisfying . . . because this retrospective confirms that, whatever else may be said of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, its work and words were not only taken to heart by its initial audience but are still taken seriously by serious people." --Milton Goldberg, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Education Commission of the States and Executive Director, National Commission on Excellence in Education

"The Koret Task Forces does a valuable service for American education. Its recommendations are largely on target as we stick with the task of improving our schools and move toward the goal of 'leaving no child behind.'" --James B. Hunt Jr., Governor of North Carolina, 1977–l985, l993–2001, and Chairman, the James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy.

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