Chapter Overview

Chapter 14 begins by making explicit an idea implied throughout Part I of this text: that one route to understanding American educational history is through examining the various reform movements that have shaped American schooling. This chapter’s treatment of the contemporary reform movement corresponds specifically to Chapter 8, which recounts a school reform movement to which the current movement is often compared: the Conant era reform following the Soviet launching of Sputnik. With the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, policy makers and social critics predicted that

the weakness of American education would usher in an era of economic decline. Although unprecedented prosperity by the end of the 1990s dispelled those dire warnings, the reform movement, fueled by critical teacher shortages and the need for educational responses to changing demographics, presses forward. Four themes characterize the current reform movement: standardized assessment as indicative of educational excellence; tension between concerns for excellence and concerns for diversity and equity; student and parent choice in schooling; and restructuring in school governance, school processes, and the teaching profession. A critical analysis shows that the earlier economic problems resided in economic and political policies, not in school policies. The Primary Source Reading presents the argument that the school reform movement has not succeeded in educating our nation's youth because it was never intended to.