A Nation at Risk, Again! (Part One) The Imperative for preventing our leaders from selling a generation of children into indentured servitude.

The once unchallenged moral authority of our nation is at risk. This source of pride and self-assuredness has been an implicit endorsement of policies from arming violent, extremist rebels; to nation-building; to extraordinary rendition; to a financial crisis where people hiding trillions, and losing billions, were rewarded with millions. Those gleaming successes of our great nation have been undermined with the blaming of the public sector for recent destruction caused by insatiable greed and the ownership of policy by the free market and the private sector. Instead of efforts to halt this assault on common sense and educate citizens to reverse continued moral erosion, what followed was a coordinated effort from the nation's leaders to drive public schools and their students to serve the same market that cripples the nation's economy and world-standing. If allowed to continue unchecked, misguided education reforms and the absence of accountability for leaders in policy and finance threaten to condemn generations to come to lives of dis-empowered indentured servitude: not free themselves, but working merely to survive and serve the "free market". The result would be the loss of the nation's status as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to the rest of the world.