This chapter focuses on the explanatory models used for Latinos from the pre-and posteducational reform initiatives that arose from the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Educational Reform, a study of the quality of American education during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Without a doubt, A Nation at Risk became the most seminal critique and call2 to action in American education, creditedwith setting intomotion themajor reforms of the past 20 years (Bell and Crosby, 1993). Its bellicose language, reflected by statements such

as “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war’’ (The National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), became emblemic of the waves of reform frenzy that followed.