Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans awoke to a forceful little report that, depending on your point of view, either ruined public education or saved it.

On April 26, 1983, in a White House ceremony, Ronald Reagan took possession of "A Nation at Risk." The product of nearly two years' work by a blue-ribbon commission, it found poor academic performance at nearly every level and warned that our education system was "being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity."

It kick-started decades of tough talk about public schools and reforms that culminated in 2002's No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration law that pushes schools to improve kids' basic skills or face ever-tougher sanctions.

Twenty-five years later, the sole teacher on the 1983 panel says the tough talk was just what the doctor ordered.

"In order to move a nation to make changes, you have to find some very incisive language," says Jay Sommer. Now 81 and teaching Hebrew at a suburban synagogue, Sommer was a high school language teacher in New Rochelle, N.Y., when tapped to help produce the report.

A true Cold War document, it famously stated: "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. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

Sommer says the harsh rhetoric should have come as no surprise.

"Any reasonable teacher should have understood at the time — and I did — that we need to tighten up that belt. We have to do something."

Dubbed "the most important education reform document of the 20th century" by education historian Diane Ravitch, "A Nation at Risk" found plenty to fret about: Only one-third of 17-year-olds, it found, could solve a math problem requiring several steps; only one-fifth could write a decent persuasive essay. Millions of adults were illiterate. SAT scores were dropping.

The findings were met with skepticism by most education groups, who said it painted too harsh a picture of a system that was continually, if slowly, improving. Teachers actually hissed when Milt Goldberg, the panel's executive director, spoke to the National Education Association's annual meeting. The NEA's executive committee assured members that it was "just another passing fad that would fade like the morning haze."

But American Federation of Teachers head Albert Shanker quickly embraced the recommendations, says his biographer, Richard Kahlenberg. Shanker believed that "if teachers wanted to be part of the reform movement, they had no choice than to ... become part of the solution."

To allege that "A Nation at Risk" hurt public education is to ignore what could have been, Kahlenberg says. In 1981, Reagan's education platform basically consisted of three ideas: supporting private schools through vouchers and tuition tax credits, reducing federal education spending and abolishing the federal U.S. Education Department.

After the report, Kahlenberg says, "Reagan had to back off on the spending cuts for education — he continued to mouth rhetoric about vouchers and privatization, but it got no traction at all."

Twenty-five years later, only a minuscule number of students attend private schools on the public dime. And federal K-12 education spending has grown from $16 billion in 1980 to nearly $72 billion in 2007.

That's cold comfort for those who say "A Nation At Risk" inaugurated a series of continuous attacks on public schools. "That was the 'rising tide' that we got engulfed with — the rising tide of negative reports," says Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. In 1983, he was superintendent of Princeton, N.J., schools, and remembers wondering how to get people talking about education. He thought the report might be just the thing: A president barnstorming the nation talking about public schools? What could be better?

Then Houston read it.

He was not amused.

"It was an overstatement of the problem, and it led to sort of hysterical responses," he says. For one, it took liberties with the link between economic development and overall education rates.

Yes, the connection makes intuitive sense, he says — but when the dot-com boom made millionaires of ordinary Americans in the 1990s, "no one came to my office and thanked me."