
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 28, 1993                   TAG: 9307280014
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`TIDE OF MEDIOCRITY' STILL THREAT TO SCHOOLS

Ten years ago, a national commission warned that a rising tide of mediocrity threatened to engulf the nation's schools.

Since the warning that the nation's education system was at risk, there have been constant attempts, at times almost frantic, to improve the schools.

The results have been mixed, education experts said: There has been some improvement but not enough.

"I think educationally the nation is still at risk," said Milton Goldberg, who was executive director of the national Commission on Excellence in Education, which wrote the report "A Nation at Risk."

Even though many educators already were talking about the need for changes and two states had introduced reform legislation, the report shoved the need for improvement to the forefront, said Goldberg, who now is executive director of the National Commission on Time and Learning, a group studying the relationship between time in school and learning.

David Gardner, the commission's chairman, said that in some respects the report did its job.

"We did check the downward trend. We did move the issue up the political agenda. The number of young people who are taking hard and more demanding courses of study has increased dramatically. The numbers of students going into teaching has gone up dramatically," he said.

But the results have been only a qualified success.

"Nominally, we reversed the tide, but not with either the momentum or the magnitude of change for which we hoped," said Gardner, who heads the charitable Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif.

There was a surge of interest immediately after the report was released. Most states began looking at education reform.

As the economy slowed in the late 1980s, money for classroom changes, such as buying computers or science equipment, has dwindled, said Lawrence Picus, an education-finance analyst at the University of Southern California.

Most states and school districts are struggling just to keep up with enrollment growth.

by CNB