TWENTY YEARS AGO, the National Commission on Excellence in Education delivered a thunderbolt in the form of a report called A Nation at Risk. Risk awakened millions of Americans to a crisis in the nation's system of primary and secondary education. That system did not suddenly crash in the early 1980s. The declines and shortcomings so starkly set forth in A Nation at Risk had been accumulating for many years. But until the commission documented and framed them as a grave problem in urgent need of attention, many Americans--especially those within the field of education--had supposed that the schools were doing an adequate job. The commission called an abrupt halt to this smug contentment, It admonished the nation in forceful, martial language that America faced a threat to its national security and economic vitality. Nor since the late 1950s, when Sputnik raised the possibility that the Soviet Union was surpassing us in science and mathematics, had there been such alarm over the weakness of U.S. schools, By the 1960s, however, that sense of urgency had faded and the focus of reform had turned away from academic performance. Well-intended efforts to address racial segregation, meet the needs of handicapped youngsters, compensate for disadvantage, and provide bilingual schooling for immigrants eclipsed concern about student achievement, They also produced much red tape, litigiousness, and contentious battles over means and ends. Teacher organizations, at the same time, asserted their right to bargain collectively and to strike, which brought them unprecedented power over schools and school systems. The Sputnik-inspired commitment to education quality, in other words, had clearly lost priority. SAT scores peaked in 1964 and declined thereafter, reaching their nadir about the time Risk was unleashed. Twenty years following the alarm sounded by Risk, by contrast, the commitment to solve the problems that it documented remains keen, The commission has effectively recast many people's thinking about education from a focus on resources, services, and mindless innovation that absorbed us during the 1960s and 1970s to an emphasis on achievement that remains central today. It has laid bare the truths that equity without excellence is an empty achievement, quantity without quality an unkept promise. But while its reverberations are still being felt, solid and conclusive reforms in American primary and secondary education remain elusive. What the Commission Said The excellence commission organized its findings within four broad topics: content, expectations, time, and teaching. Under these headings, Risk issued a 24-count indictment of American primary-secondary education as the commissioners found it in 1983. The spirit of these indictments can be sensed from the following excerpts: * "Secondary school curricula have been homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. In effect, we have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course." * "The amount of homework for high school seniors has decreased... and grades have risen as average student achievement has been declining." * "In 13 States, 50 percent or more of the units required for high school graduation may be electives chosen by the student. Given this freedom ... many students opt for less demanding personal service courses, such as bachelor living." * "A study of the school week in the United States found that some schools provided students only 17 hours of academic instruction, [In] other industrialized countries, it is not unusual for academic high school students to spend 8 hours a day at school, 220 days per year." * "Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.... Half of the newly employed mathematics, science, and English teachers are not qualified to teach those subjects. …