WASHINGTON - Twenty years ago, a national commission published the most incendiary federal report in the history of American school reform.

To this day, educators, elected officials, business leaders and parents are wrestling with the arguments ignited by "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform."

Released at the White House on April 26, 1983, by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the report warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity" was eroding the educational foundations of the nation's economy.

Ripples from the report swept reform efforts far beyond the high schools that the panel was expected to study. As its reforms evolved into others, the unanticipated consequences stretched from reading readiness tests in Head Start programs to a reduced emphasis on college aptitude exams.

Even the elaborate system of state standards, student tests and teacher accountability mandated by President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act grew out of the waves of reform generated by the 1983 report.

The report's language was unusually provocative.

"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," it said. "As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

Contending that other nations were catching up with the United States in business, industry, science and technological innovation, the commission charged that Americans had "squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge," when the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite in 1957.

Using a Cold War analogy, it stated: "We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."

The impact was immediate and enormous. Arkansas alone passed more than 120 state laws on education within 18 months. The drive for school reforms, begun by Southern governors who saw education as a way to lift the economy of the poorest region of the country, spread to all of the states.

"It became the main topic of conversation around office water coolers," recalled Education Secretary Rod Paige. "People who had not given much thought to our nation's education system suddenly sat up and listened, and what they heard scared them."

Kathleen Lyons, then working for the New Jersey affiliate of the National Education Association, recalls how her phone rang for weeks with calls from reporters who had ignored press releases from the nation's largest teachers union.

" 'A Nation at Risk' put education reform on the public's radar screen, and it's never fallen off," said Lyons, who now is the union's senior Washington spokesperson. "It was a watershed event that changed how teachers teach, and what's expected of students."

Harvard historian Patricia Albjerg Graham said the report crystallized simmering worries that had been spelled out in far greater detail, with more intellectual nuances, in at least half a dozen non-federal reports.

"It was the only one that caught the public imagination," she said.

Before the report, most Americans believed that "it was a fine idea for some kids to get an academic education," she said. Afterwards, most felt "all kids need an academic education" in order to acquire the skills, knowledge and habits of lifetime learning needed to thrive in the modern workplace.

Jay Sommer, the only teacher on a commission that was dominated by college presidents and scholars, freely acknowledges that the rhetorical indictment was hyped.

"Things were bad, but they weren't that bad," said Sommer, a 75-year-old Holocaust survivor who taught foreign languages at the high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., and was the current national teacher of the year.

"We thought we could improve education enormously if we caught people's attention," Sommers said.

"We did catch their attention, and they improved it," Sommers maintained. He said the proof is in the competence of the education system's recent graduates: "Our business world is functioning very well, even in a tough period, and our young people were prepared to do what had to be done in Iraq."

Still, he conceded, "There are certain ills that aren't easily corrected by commissions in the absence of miracles. It's not a perfect world yet. That's a surprise?"

Most high school students now take the full set of core courses endorsed by the commission: four years of English and three years of science, math and social science. Its call for requiring a half-year of computer science has been superseded by a decision to weave technology throughout the curriculum.

Its calls for "more rigorous and measurable standards, and higher expectations, for academic performance and student conduct" led directly to reforms that eventually culminated in the No Child Left Behind Act, which Bush signed into law in January 2002.

Part of its call for higher pay, career ladders and better pre-service and in-service education for teachers has been fulfilled. Average salaries, at $44,604 last year, are 21 percent higher in inflation-adjusted terms than they were in 1983. More districts subsidize and honor master teachers, more schools assign mentors to new teachers, and more colleges of education are judged by whether their graduates do a good job.

But other suggestions had little resonance. They included the commission's suggestions for a longer school day, an 11-month school year for teachers, reduced paperwork burdens on teachers and principals, and "professionally based, market-sensitive and performance-based" pay for teachers, principals and superintendents.

"Probably they were better on diagnosis than prescription," said Robert Schwartz, a Harvard lecturer who spent most of the last 20 years shepherding joint efforts by business leaders and state governors to reform the nation's public schools.

The gloomiest assessment of the report's impact comes from Paige and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Education, who maintain that the report increased inputs for education without improving academic results.

"A Nation at Risk set off a wave of well-intentioned school reform efforts," Paige said in February. "But the achievement gap grew wider, test scores (in reading and math) stayed flat. And a most disturbing trend emerged: The longer students stayed in school, the farther behind they fell academically."

In an interview Tuesday, Under Secretary William Hansen said, "Any way you look at it, two out of three fourth-graders still can't read proficiently, (while) the amount spent on K-12 education has grown from $129 billion in 1983 to more than $400 billion."

On the other hand, in a 35-nation reading test released by the department in early April, some 2,500 American fourth-graders tied eight countries for fourth place. They were behind Sweden, the Netherlands and England, but ahead of 23 countries, including France, Russia, Singapore, Israel and Iran. A lot of the additional spending that followed the report didn't fund reform. It helped pay for the rising cost of educating the growing number of children who had disabilities or came from immigrant families where English isn't spoken, said Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, an alliance of more than 100 national education groups.

"Since 'A Nation at Risk' rang the alarm, complacency has disappeared," Kealy said. "We continue to raise the bar for what students and teachers should do, and now demand that no child be left behind, including the poorest, the educationally disadvantaged, the culturally limited non-English speaking students, and those with disabilities."

Contrasting views of the report's legacy are found in two paperback books with question marks in their titles. "Our Schools & Our Future ... Are We Still at Risk?" was published by the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, Calif., and "A Nation Reformed?: American Education 20 years after A Nation at Risk" was published by Harvard Education Press in Cambridge, Mass.

The commission "was quite effective in focusing attention on the need for excellence in academic achievement," said Chester Finn, the Hoover fellow who headed the task force that wrote that think

tank's book.

David T. Gordon sought a variety of views, rather than a consensus, when he edited the Harvard book.

Finn's task force "did a fabulous job of dealing out dope slaps to the educational establishments, getting people to rethink what they're doing and why," Gordon said. "But after 20 years, we're still in a lot of ways in the early stages of school reform. Rather than bash teachers or principals, I think we need to realize that change on the scale we're talking about takes a little time and patience."

Paul Peterson, a Hoover senior fellow who served on Finn's task force, said Gordon had a point. He recalled reading that "when you move from one world view to another, you have to wait for the first generation to die off; people don't change their mind, they are replaced.

On the Web
A Nation At Risk
www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html

A Nation Reformed?
www.edletter.org/past/issues/2003-jf/note.shtml

Are We Still At Risk?
www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/osof.html