Nation At Risk

Introduction
Our nation is at risk: this is how the legendary “A Nation at Risk” opened its scathing assessment of American public schools in 1983. The paper gave five recommendations to fix the problems of the U.S. education system: strengthened requirements, measurable standards, higher pay for teachers, increased time in the classroom, and accountability. Today, the country still faces many of the same problems, such as teacher shortages, low test scores, and poor teacher training programs. In the past forty years, the United States has doubled the expenditures it spends for every child to get an education, with no concrete improvements in student achievement (Guggenheim & Chilcott, 2010). According to the Program for International Student
He worried that many traditional public schools operated like a factory or military unit where all students were expected to learn the same material in the same way and at the same pace. Shanker argued that the disappointing results of America’s public schools showed that some children required something different in order to learn. Influenced by the panic induced by “A Nation at Risk”, Shanker concluded that the increase of bureaucracy in education hurt teachers, and believed if left to their own devices, educators could find ways to help improve the academic performance of the 80 percent of struggling students in America. He desired a bottom-up approach to reform where teachers could have power and influence to decide to do something very different from the rest of the system. In his speech to the National Press Club in 1988, Shanker paralleled the existing education system to a doctor telling a patient whose condition has not improved after taking prescribed medicine that it was their fault for not responding to the pill. In schools, Shanker said, “we have one remedy, one pill, one way of reaching kids, and then we say that something is wrong with the kids if they don't respond to our remedy” (1988). While “A Nation at Risk” exposed many of the problems within schools and prescribed important remedies, the emphasis on standardized testing and
These alternative education environments were meant to empower teachers to form learning communities where educators could work together to come up with innovative solutions to meeting student’s needs in the classroom. By creating another option, families and students could choose a charter school in another district over their assigned traditional public school. These could make great schools accessible to students from a larger geographic area instead of restricting them to individual neighborhoods. His vision was to integrate districts and promote diversity within schools across the country. Groups of teachers could apply to the state for a charter with an idea of how their innovative techniques could reach the students that were being left behind by the current school system. Once approved, these teachers would get an authorized charter from the state and continue to operate for a period of time until they could reapply for their charter and show that their techniques had improved these children’s educational