From the approximately three dozen reports that describe the crisis in American education, the president of the Canadian Educational Researchers Association briefly describes four: "A Nation at Risk" (National Commission on Excellence in Education); "High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America" (Ernest L. Boyer); "Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School" (Theodore R. Sizer); and "A Place Called School" (John Goodlad). Canada is not yet "a nation at risk," because education is strongly entrenched as a provincial responsibility; a conservative noninterventionist Supreme Court influences the direction of education; and the timelag between the creation of educational ideas in the United States and their movement to Canada gives Canadians space to evaluate and select the best of the ideas. However, embedded in these reports are statements and ideas that indicate a need for investigation in the Canadian context: two particular areas of need are good qualitative research on the adolescent in high school, and a general education curriculum that combines both the idea of education for citizenship and education for eventual on-the-job skill development. Finally, the American experience suggests the desirability of research in the Canadian setting on the influence that standardized testing programs have on educational practice, and on how to assess or describe higher order cognitive achievements. (MLF)