ABSTRACT
The year 1983 marked a kind of education reform renaissance in the United States with the publication of the now-famous report “A Nation at Risk,” prepared by then-President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education. This document essentially implicated our entire public education system, warning of the dangerous road we were traveling and the seemingly fatal education and economic ends we would meet. It wagged its finger at many aspects of schooling in the United States: the curriculum, schools’ organizational structures, and teachers, to name just a few. However, as the resulting so-called reform movement picked up steam, we quickly seemed to shift away from discussing our joint destinies and shared responsibilities to identifying individual culprits. We went from a nation at risk to a place where only certain children were “at risk.” This notion became so pervasive that “at risk” rapidly evolved into a code phrase for poor students, immigrants, and students of color. Indeed, we began talking about poverty as a “culture” rather than a socioeconomic state of being or injustice (Gorski, 2008).
