Abstract
Tom Glass of the University of Northern Illinois originally presented this paper to the National Conference of BEMAS held in Reading in September 1990. In it he laments the failure of the American public education system to devise successful intervention strategies for large numbers of minority and poor students in the nation's inner cities. He stresses that, if the United States is to remain economically competitive, it must find answers to three questions: What are the reasons for such failure? What needs to be changed? What chance has reform?