In 1983, the Commission produced A Nation at Risk, a remarkable document that offered a candid assessment of American secondary education and provided wholly sensible ideas for reform. Quite a bit of ANAR remains depressingly current—if you strip out the dates, parts could have been written yesterday. That is the core of ANAR’s present relevance: more than three decades later, most of it a period of almost complete Boomer power, the problems remain the same while many of ANAR’s recommendations languish ignored and untried. It was not that Boomers did not know what to do, it was that they did
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