More than three decades ago, America's business and education leaders convinced President Reagan that our nation was indeed at risk of educational complacency. Our leaders must once again step up to urge President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deliver a no-holds-barred analysis for our education system from early childhood to higher education—“A Nation at Risk 2.0”
if you will. We must identify our nation’s best and brightest to conduct this analysis. And to be effective and sustainable, this collaborative effort must be bipartisan and draw on the expertise from the public and private sectors—business and nonprofits, research and practitioners. In many ways, we have come full circle from that pivotal moment in 1983 when the Department of Education released the original “A Nation at Risk,
” an in-depth analysis that exposed the U.S. complacency towards its education system and the threat this created for our future. When that report was released, we were at the cusp of a technological revolution—a new computer program called Microsoft Word was unveiled and cellular phones first became commercially available to U.S. consumers. These innovations transformed our society and celebrated America’s ingenuity. At the same time, we learned that about 13 percent of our 17-year-olds were functionally illiterate, SAT scores were dropping and students needed an increased array of remedial courses in college, according to the report issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. This alarm bell was the starting point of many of the reforms we have seen in education since that time, including more rigorous curriculum and standards. While there have been incremental successes in educational progress, the rapid pace of change in our global economy and the educational advances of our international counterparts once again has put this nation at great risk of falling behind economically—an even greater risk than we faced in 1983. For those who doubt, consider today’s national education results. An analysis of
National Assessment of Educational Progress scores shows nearly 6 out of 10 students don’t have the math or reading skills for entry-level college courses.
NAEP results for fourth and eighth grades in 2013 also show:
- About a third of students are proficient in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading, or 8th grade math.
- Only 4 in 10 students are proficient in 4th grade math, with some demographic groups of students performing much lower.
- About a fifth of African-American, Latino and Native American students are proficient in 4th and 8th grade reading, with only a fourth of low-income 4th graders proficient in math.

Bev Perdue is a former public school teacher, a former governor of North Carolina, and the founder of
digiLEARN, a national nonprofit dedicated to accelerating digital learning for all ages with a goal of increasing personal learning options for students and expanding instructional opportunities for teachers. Bev Perdue was elected North Carolina’s 73rd ...