Sacramento, CA -- American society tends to have the attention span of a hummingbird. Momentous events arrive only to be swept away and forgotten, to our detriment. Consider, for example, A Nation at Risk.

That 1983 publication of the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned that America’s academic slide threatened the very future of the nation. Fifteen years later, little has changed, which is why A Nation Still at Risk should be a summer reading priority for those in charge of California’s schools.

The signers of this manifesto are both liberal and conservative: former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, former Congressman Floyd Flake, English professor E.D. Hirsch, Willard Fair of the Miami Urban League, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, and even an assortment of professional educators, including Yvonne Larsen, president of California’s State Board of Education.

Since 1983, the authors write, more than 10 million Americans have reached the 12th grade not knowing the essentials of U.S. history and a full six million dropped out of high school altogether. Academically, says the manifesto, “we fall off a cliff somewhere in the middle and upper grades. Large numbers of students remain at risk.” In fact, “we seem to be the only country in the world whose children fall farther behind the longer they stay in school.” The results are apparent to all but the willfully blind.

The manifesto states that employers find it difficult to hire people who have the skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes they require for technologically sophisticated positions. While many of these jobs are in California, they are now filled by immigrants. But despite the failings, the warnings go unheeded and the system remains in denial.

“There is the fantasy that America’s education crisis is a fraud, something invented by enemies of public schools.” And in California one hears the incessant refrain that the problem is a lack of spending. That’s not how the signers of the manifesto see it. The root problem is monopoly.

“Power over our education system,” says the manifesto, “has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few who don’t really want things to change.” As a result, millions of Americans are “stuck with the least qualified teachers, the most rigid bureaucratic structures, the fewest choices and the shoddiest quality.” The solution?

Among the 10 changes needed, the signers include two of particular relevance to California. First, every state needs a strong charter-school law. California has recently expanded its own but the manifesto’s authors suggest still more choices be made available.

“People must have the power to shape the decisions that affect their lives and the lives of their children.” Therefore, “let the public dollars to which they are entitled follow individual children to the schools they select.” Why? Because “it is madness to continue acting as if one school model fits every situation and it is a sin to make a child attend a bad school if there’s a better one across the street.”

California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office is in favor of a pilot program of choice scholarships for children in the state’s worst schools. Such a program is a good place to start but all children deserve the same opportunity. If we fail to give it to them, the next time we take stock there may be no pardon.

-- K. Lloyd Billingsley