“Intellectually and morally, America’s educational system is failing far too many people.”

—Signatories of “A Nation Still at Risk,” 1998

In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education released a report, A Nation at Risk, that proclaimed that the quality of public education had deteriorated since the 1950s. The average SAT scores of college-bound seniors had fallen sixteen points, students were scoring much lower on standardized tests than their counterparts in other industrialized nations, and the dropout rate had risen. Fifteen years later, in April 1998, a group of educators, policymakers, and business leaders representing various points on the political spectrum gathered at a conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and several other organizations to discuss what had happened with American education since A Nation at Risk had been printed. Their conclusions were announced in an education reform manifesto entitled “A Nation...