Nation At Risk Reflection

Reflection upon the Nation at Risk and 25 years later article brought many questions about how the American educational system can be improved. Throughout the first article, it depicts how American industry and companies’ move over sees, creating a globalized economy, which according to the author impacted our educational values and the system itself. The notion that school is not as important as it is in other countries was evident in both articles. The Nation at Risk posed these dire problems that our country is facing, only to follow up with more insult to injury by implying in the 25 Years Later article that nothing really had changed throughout time. I thought the tone of this article was very fearful of foreign interference within our own country, evermore so at a time where we should be collaborating with other countries, not competing with them.

In the article I noticed that since 1983 America has put may more focus on education and what the problem is. However, through the skyrocket of standardized tests controlling all education, I would argue that we have taken a step backwards. Standardize testing is used to measure unrealistic standards of schools today. How are you supposed to measure competency, and then measure a school’s worth when there are other factors that result in bad testing scores. I think if this country really wants to improve education to compete with other foreign countries, it needs to find more true ways of measuring the growth and knowledge of students around the United States.