A Nation Still at Risk

More than 25 years ago, A Nation at Risk detailed the growing inequities and lack of opportunities in our public education system, highlighting the obstacles the United States would have to overcome if these problems were not immediately addressed. Yet, our achievement gap remains at disastrously high levels, as evidenced by the 2009 NAEP Long-Term Trend Data, which showed a 53-point gap in reading proficiency between Black and White 17-year-olds and a 33-point gap in math proficiency between Latino and White 17-year-olds. The United States is now paying a hefty price for its opportunity and achievement gap. McKinsey & Company recently estimated that closing the achievement gap between White students and their Black and Latino peers could increase the annual Gross Domestic Product by more than half a trillion dollars.

Collectively, policy makers have spent a great deal of time diagnosing the problem. While human resource and structural reforms are key components to closing the learning gap, just as important to the reform effort is accountability: the development and implementation of outcome and resource accountability standards which guarantee students the resources needed to have a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. Reform that is limited to terminating staff or restructuring individual schools may look like progress, but in a larger analysis only benefits a few. We are able to identify today individual high-poverty, high-minority schools where the students are performing well; however, we are not able to identify high-poverty, high-minority districts where students have access to high-quality educational opportunities. We need true reform that changes systems and affects all students, rather than approaches that save a few to make us feel better or allow us to “window dress” our systemic failures. Without access to real, system-wide, high-quality learning opportunities, we can never maximize the effectiveness of public education and achieve full participation in our democracy.

Under our current system, access to some of our nation’s districts or schools brings with it the virtual certainty of high school graduation and access to and success in postsecondary education. Access to other districts or schools within the same states, however, brings near certainty of an education that ends well short of a high school diploma, with little prospect for college or employment with livable wages and the near certain perpetuation of inter-generational poverty.