The current era of corporate education reform began with the 1983 publication of the Reagan
administration's report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, prepared by a
committee of prominent professors, politicians, teachers, and business executives.5 Not only did the report attack many of the equity - minded federal education reforms that preceded it, A Nation at Risk also manufactured a narrative of
public education in crisis, steeped in the language of Cold War military paranoia: «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 authors wrote.