HEADLINE: The Sixth Bracey Report on the condition of public education.
BYLINE: Bracey, Gerald W.
Mr. Bracey takes his annual close look at the myths about and the hard data
describing the current performance of American public schools.
Last year, the Fifth Bracey Report awarded Family Circle a "Least Credible
Article" prize for its school-bashing op-ed piece by Rush Limbaugh.
Unfortunately, Al Frankan's expose Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, was not yet
available to use as a trophy. An "Intensity of Loathing" award went to Business
Week for its "Will Schools Ever Get Better?" cover and accompanying article.
This year, we have all new prize winners and more of them.
The Envelope, Please
The "Most Unethical Advertisement" award is won jointly by the National
Alliance of Business, the National Governors' Association, the Business
Roundtable, the American Federation of Teachers, and, most incredibly, the U.S.
Department of Education. These august groups earned this accolade for sponsoring
a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday, January 31, that lamented the
state of education in this nation. On the left half of the page, 15 countries
were listed by number. The United States was number 14, and the words "United
States" were boldly circled. On the right, the text read, "If this were a
ranking in Olympic hockey, we would be outraged." (This ad led me to coin the
phrase "Worst Possible Spin Syndrome," a label that, unfortunately, must often
be applied to reports about educational data.)
The number 14 is the rank of American 13-year-olds in math in the Second
International Assessment of Educational Progress. Within the squishy boundaries
of propaganda, the ad is accurate. American 13-year-olds did rank 14th among 15
nations. But ranks tell you nothing about performance. In the 200-meter dash at
the Atlanta Olympics, Michael Marsh of Houston ranked third in his semifinal
heat and finished dead last in the finals, although his performance in the two
races differed by a mere .22 of a second. A 7% improvement in his performance in
the finals would have given Michael Marsh - not Michael Johnson - first place
and a world record.
If one looks at the performances - the actual scores on the math test - one
finds that the American 13-year-olds averaged 55% correct. And the international
average of all nations? Fifty-eight percent. For a nation obsessed with being
number one, as America is, this sort of average performance is not acceptable.
But it presents a very different picture from the gloomy one
suggested by the
ranks. Students from Korea, the top-ranked country, got 73% correct. This 18%
difference between American and Korean students was the biggest gap between the
two nations in the study; the smallest difference was just 3%. As we shall see
below, this is not much of a reward for the price Korean youngsters pay to be
number one.
The "Longest-Running Goofy Speech" award goes to Louis Gerstner, Jr., the CEO
of IBM. Gerstner began his "the-system-is-broken" speech several years ago and
continued it through the March summit with the nation's governors and business
leaders. Along the way, he has maintained that, if we don't shape up our
schools, we will soon be a Third World economy. Of course, this is ludicrous. In
1994 and 1995, the World Economic Forum declared the U.S. economy the most
competitive in the world. In 1996 the Forum changed its formula, and the U.S.
fell all the way to fourth place among 25 industrialized nations. The
International Institute for Management retained a formula similar to the old one
used by the Forum, and the U.S. maintained its top ranking.
The "Most Unethical Means of Publicizing a 'Study'" award is shared by Paul
Peterson and Jiang Tao Du of Harvard and Jay Greene of the University of
Houston. The basis for this award is discussed in the section on choice.
The "Most Ludicrous Fact Pulled from Thin Air" award goes to Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). This should be the speaker's second award in a row
in this category; only an oversight kept me from handing out the prize last year
for his comment, recorded in the Fifth Bracey Report, "Three out of four of our
students are not learning to read." This year, addressing the National PTA
Legislative Congress, Gingrich declared that "55% to 60% of our seniors don't
know enough about our culture to sustain it." One wonders what Gingrich might
have said a century ago, when the high school graduation rate was 3%.
The 'Failed Miracle'
This heading is the title of a 1996 feature article about Japan.(1) A
heretofore adoring U.S. press is at long last showing some appropriate
journalistic skepticism about Asian schools. Asian students still score higher
on tests than American students, no question. But it is clear now from the Time
article and from other essays that appeared over the past year that American
students can beat the socks off their Asian counterparts if we are willing to
take only four simple steps.
1. Convince American parents that, when their children come home from public
school, they should feed them and then ship them off to a private school or
tutor until 10 p.m.; most youngsters, both elementary and secondary, will need
to go all day on Sunday, too.
2. Convince American parents to spend 20% to 30% of their income on these
after-school schools.
3. Convince American parents that, when their children turn 4, they should
take them on their knees and tell them, "You are big boys and girls now, so you
need to start practicing for college entrance examinations."
4. Convince American students that, if they sleep four hours a night, they
will get into college, but if they sleep five hours a night, they won't; they
must study instead.
For more on these four steps, read on.
My Research column in the May 1996 Kappan contained a strong indictment of
Japanese high schools that drew extensively on Paul George's monograph, The
Japanese Secondary School: A Closer Look.(2) That volume chronicles a year
George spent in a Japanese school, observing a group of students he had earlier
observed for a year when they were seventh-graders. He reports that he and his
son, who attended the school both years, took to exchanging glances to register
their surprise and shock at what they were seeing.
And what they were seeing was a group of students so obsessed with the
upcoming college entrance examinations that they could not pay attention and
often acted in uncivil ways - when they were not actually sleeping in class. The
students were sleep-deprived from keeping late hours at jukus (cram schools).
Since their juku instructors tell them not to pay attention to what their
regular teachers say, they use the school day to catch up on their Z's.
Here's what Time had to say about the Japanese high school:
The most forceful indication that parents are disappointed in the public
schools is the intense competition to get into private ones, from kindergarten
through high school. The key to success is the juku, an evening and weekend cram
school where children from the age of four prepare for entrance examinations.
Nearly 60% of junior high school students take juku classes, which cost their
parents as much as $ 400 a month. They usually study material at least a year
ahead of the public school curriculum and endure rigorous schedules that leave
no time for the playground.
Akiko Tsutsui, a 10-year-old fifth-grader, gets out of school at 3:30 p.m.
and goes straight home to have a snack and do her homework. Three afternoons a
week she leaves again at 4:45 for a juku session that lasts from 5:10 to 10:00.
For almost the entire class, Akiko will listen to tutors explain how to answer
test questions and will practice taking them herself. She sometimes attends all
day on Sunday for extra help. The classes give Akiko a better chance of getting
into a local private junior high school.
Competition in Japan has always been fierce, and the schools have always
demanded conformity and intense rote learning. But the system has become an
extreme, decadent version of what it used to be. And not only do children suffer
on account of the schools and cram courses, but they may not be learning what
they ought to.
Have a nice childhood, Akiko.
Recall that Susan Goya, an American who has taught in Japanese schools for 20
years, made similar comments in the October 1993 issue of the Kappan. She cited
the juku as critical to the success of Japanese students because "the quality of
education in Japanese public schools is poor."(3)
The observations of George and Goya were further corroborated by Susan
Elbert, an American teaching English in a rural part of Japan. Even there,
Elbert reports, 70% of the students attend juku and often do not get to sleep
before 1 a.m. "I have talked to many teachers and students," Elbert reports,
"and they all seem convinced that a student cannot get into a prestigious high
school or college with only the knowledge acquired in public
school. I was
shocked. The exams are really difficult. You need special training and attention
to pass them, and you can't get it at a public school."(4)
Elbert also confirms the comments of earlier authors that ijime - bullying -
occurs when the object of the bullying is perceived as somehow "different."
Elbert rejects the word ijime, though, saying that kurushime - torturing - is
more accurate. "Looking deeper than the mentally damaging words, threats,
demands, and beatings, these troubled students seem victims of what Japanese
society institutionalizes as ideal, namely 'sameness.' Two tormentors said of
their classmate after he hanged himself last fall, 'We have no regrets. He was
weak, and his character was poor.'"
Elbert's and George's depictions of the upright, hyperanxious Japanese
students make Mary Jordan's comments on Korean youngsters even more telling and
poignant. Jordan, a former education reporter for the Washington Post, now with
that newspaper's foreign service in Tokyo, writes that "today's South Korean
students make the famously intense Japanese students look easygoing." Her
article on the topic opens with the following story:
It was 11 p.m. and fourth-grader Moon Sae Bom was solving math problems and
double-checking her social studies maps. For the past two hours, her mother had
sat beside her, checking her answers, making sure the 10-year-old didn't fall
asleep.
This is a regular night at the Moon house and in millions of homes throughout
South Korea, where mothers spend hours a day studying with their elementary and
secondary school children, even plying them with caffeine to keep them awake and
learning. There is a huge new industry of private rotors for women who need to
relearn algebra, world history, and other subjects so they can help with
homework.
Across this academically hyper-achieving country, students file out of public
and private high schools not at 3 p.m. but at 10 p.m. Every weeknight they study
in their classrooms from dinner until late into the evening.
Sae Bom's mother not only helps check answers, she spends more than $ 30,000
a year for private tutors. Many Koreans, says Jordan, now spend 20 to 30 percent
of their income this way.(5)
Korean youths appear to be even more sleep-deprived than the Japanese. Jordan
cites one girl who says she studies 80 hours a week. She studies in school until
11 p.m., puts in another hour at home, and then is back on the subway to
school at 7:40 the next morning. Nothing in Jordan's description suggests that
this girl is an exception.
As in Japan, Korean schools pay no attention to individuality or creativity.
All teachers teach the same thing, and the students memorize it. About the girl
who studies 80 hours a week, Jordan writes, "She has heard about American high
school students hanging out at malls, joining activities like the track team or
the yearbook, and even dating, but there is little time here for that."
Anyone still want to be number one in the world in math and science? Are
American parents willing to eliminate their children's childhood for a few
measly percentage points on a math test and even less on a science test? Sae
Bom, incidentally, is lucky. Her mother plans to send her to high
school in
Britain, where, she has been told, children can be children.
Given that they spend all this time grinding the books, one can wonder why
the Korean students are not even farther ahead of our TV-drenched couch
potatoes, who, according to a recent report, seldom spend even an hour a day on
homework on school nights (and forget weekends).(6) In the Second International
Assessment of Educational Progress, where U.S. students ranked 14th of 15
nations in mathematics and 13th in science, Korean 13-year-olds finished first,
but they got only 18% more items correct in mathematics and only 11% more
correct in science. A paltry 18% for all that effort and angst and a childhood
for-gone? I don't think so. Although Jordan contends that Korean children start
worrying about college when they are 4, at age 9 they got exactly one more item
right (out of 58) than American 9-year-olds. If we were to control statistically
for hours of study, no doubt we'd find American youngsters ahead of the Korean
children.
Choice, Charters, and Contracts: New Wines or Trojan Horses?
The grand proposals for choice have diminished since the biggest advocates at
the national level - George Bush and Lamar Alexander - left office. But choice
as a political movement is far from dead. It has just moved from the White House
to the statehouse and "morphed" into newer forms: contracting for services,
private vouchers, and, especially, charter schools. Not much is happening with
the first two, but the charter school scene is hot. If Judy Garland and Mickey
Rooney were around today, they'd probably shout, "Hey, gang, let's start a
charter school!" Education's one consistency is its proneness to fads, but
seldom have so many waxed so enthusiastic over an innovation yet to prove its
effectiveness.
The arguments for charter schools were presented in the September Kappan.
Here, I want to note some reservations. It is clear that many people are
interested not in the impact of the first round of charter schools but in what
are being called "second-order effects." For some, these second-order effects
are the improvement of public education. For others, they are the destruction of
public education.
Charter schools promise to improve the performance of students, and, in
exchange for that promise, they are granted a "charter" relieving them of some
regulations and entanglements with central office bureaucracy. Although they are
supposed to supply data in order to obtain renewals of their charters, it is not
clear that they will. The need to show that they are improving education will
certainly provide an incentive to cook the books, as happened with the failed
privatization experiment of the 1970s, performance contracting. At the moment,
though, "Charter schools' ability to improve student achievement has yet to be
proven."(7)
Whether charter schools will ever improve achievement is a question that
might never be answered. Even right-wing enthusiasts Chester Finn, Jr., Louann
Bierlein, and Bruno Manno lamented that they "have yet to see a single state
with a thoughtful and well-formed plan for evaluating its charter school
program. Perhaps this is not surprising given the sorry condition of most state
standards-assessment-accountability-evaluation systems generally. The problem,
however, is apt to be particularly acute for charter schools, where the whole
point is to deliver better results in return for greater
freedom."(8)
Jeffrey Henig, perhaps the most disinterested and careful observer on the
choice front, agrees with Finn and his colleagues. He finds that charter
schools "show few signs of interest in systematic empirical research that is
ultimately needed if we are going to be able to separate bold claim from proven
performance. Premature claims of success, reliance on anecdotal and unreliable
evidence are still the role of the day."(9)
Alex Molnar predicts that such unreliable anecdotes will prevail.
Charter schools will fail, fraud will be uncovered, and tax dollars will be
wasted. But just as certainly, glowing testimony will be paid to the dedication
and sacrifice of the selfless teachers and administrators at some "Chartermetoo"
school who transformed the lives of their students and proved the success of
charter school reform.
Free-market zealots will either claim vindication or argue that their
revolutionary ideas need more time to work. Supporters of public education will
call the experiment a costly failure and marvel at the willingness to spend
large sums on unproven alternatives while cutting resources for the public
system that serves most children. With an absence of any uniform standards, the
war of educational anecdotes and misleading statistics will remain "subject to
interpretation." And all the while, the desperation of America's poorest
children and their families will grow.(10)
And these words were written before the disaster for children called "welfare
reform" was passed.
Molnar observes that charter schools create a rather peculiar free-market
setting. When the Edutrain charter school in California failed because of fiscal
mismanagement, free-market fans cited it as a case of the market imposing its
discipline. But in a true free-market setting, those punished are those who
invested in the enterprise. Those punished by Edutrain's failure, though, were
the children who attended the school and had their lives and education
disrupted, along with the taxpayers of Los Angeles who funded the enterprise.
"The charter school market feeds on the revenue provided by taxpayers even in
failure. It is a market in which the financial risks are socialized, and the
financial gains are privatized," says Molnar. "The struggle is not, at its root,
between market-based reforms and the educational status quo. Rather it is a
battle over whether the democratic ideal of the common good can survive the
onslaught of a market mentality that threatens to turn every human relationship,
inside and outside the classroom, into a commercial transaction" (p. 167).
For the moment, though, charter schools are thriving. As Henig says,
"Legislators and citizens who balk at full-fledged choice proposals seem to find
charter schools less threatening, perhaps because they retain a clear role for
governmental oversight; proponents of more extensive choice proposals seem to
find charters an acceptable step in the right direction."
Elsewhere on the choice front, the results continue to be mixed at best. The
only project that has received something close to an adequate evaluation is
Milwaukee's choice programs, wherein up to 1.5% of the city's children are
eligible to receive vouchers to attend private schools. John Witte and his
colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have evaluated this program each year
for five years, under contract from the Wisconsin Department of Public
Instruction. They conclude that, while the attrition rate from
the program
remains puzzlingly high, "the majority remain and applaud the program." Witte's
comments scarcely constitute a ringing endorsement of the program:
Outcomes after five years of the Choice Program remain mixed. Achievement
change scores have varied considerably in the first five years of the program.
Choice students' reading scores increased the first year, fell substantially in
the second year, and have remained approximately the same in the next three
years. In math, choice students were essentially the same in the first two
years, recorded a significant increase in the third year, and then significantly
declined this last year.
Regression results, using a wide range of modeling approaches, including
yearly models and a combined four-year model, generally indicated that choice
and public school students were not much different. If there was a difference,
Milwaukee Public Schools children did somewhat better in reading.(11)
This is actually a remarkable outcome. The number of students participating
in the choice program has never approached the legal limit and has never
exceeded, on average, 70 students per school. Thus the private schools involved
are not being overwhelmed by a flood of low-income students. One might think
that such students are sufficiently few in number that they could receive more
attention in the private schools than they might in their neighborhood schools
and that their test scores would rise as a consequence. On the other hand, Peter
Cookson, another researcher in the choice arena, concludes from his observations
that private school teachers are less creative, more by-the-numbers teachers
than public school teachers.(12)
In conversation, Witte again said that the public schools are doing a better
job with their students than the choice schools, but his reasoning presents a
good-news/bad-news scenario. Initially, both choice and public schools serve
similar clienteles. As one moves up the grade ladder, though, the public
school student body is increasingly drawn from lower-income and minority
families, groups that post lower test scores. That the public schools are able
to maintain parity with the private schools, then, constitutes quite an
accomplishment. That they are not able to hang on to their middle-class clients
does not.
In connection with the Milwaukee choice program, I should note that a "study"
purporting to show that the program is effective just happened to be released on
the opening day of the Republican National Convention. The study, with Jay
Greene of the University of Houston as lead author and ardent school choice
advocate Paul Peterson as another author, was prepared for a conference on
August 30. (Peterson brought to the Brookings Institution the research that
produced John Chubb and Terry Moe's notorious book on school choice.)
Almost three weeks prior to the conference, the study was handed to the
media. A press release was given to the Associated Press, and a short version,
titled "School Choice Data Rescued from Bad Science," turned up on the op-ed
page of the Wall Street Journal on August 14. The rhetoric and tone of this
op-ed article reveal that the purpose of the "study" is not to learn what
actually happened in the Milwaukee program, but simply to persuade those who
might influence choice legislation that something positive came of it.
The study has been hyped by former Secretaries of Education William Bennett
and Lamar Alexander and by noted educator Rush Limbaugh. Surely,
this is a
historic moment. It must be the first time that any of the three have accepted
at face value the conclusions of a study conducted at Harvard. (They must have
accepted it at face value, because - aside from the "Executive Summary" and the
conclusions - it is virtually impossible to understand.) Limbaugh congratulated
the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which he frequently targets, for actually
funding something worthwhile. Although the manuscript cites that organization,
the foundation has denied that it funded the research.
It is difficult to refute the study, because it is virtually impossible to
determine what Greene and his colleagues did. In the introduction, they refer to
a "natural experiment" similar to medical studies wherein one group of people
receives a treatment and a comparable group does not. However, during the course
of the report, they refer to both analysis of covariance and regression analysis
as ways of analyzing the data. In a "natural experiment," however, neither
technique would be needed.
The principal claim is that the effects of choice show up only after three or
four years of participation. This result is from a comparison of children in the
program for that length of time with those who applied initially and were not
selected. This comparison is problematic from the outset because the attrition
rate of participants in the program is so high that very, very few of the
children who started the program are still in it after four years (perhaps not
such a great recommendation for the program itself). It is even more difficult
to find the nonselected children, who might differ from the selected group on
any number of variables. When Witte attempted to reconstruct the analysis, he
discovered that of some 72 cells that would be needed, 23 contained no children
at all, and another 20 contained three or fewer. How anything could be
determined by such empty cells and small numbers is, well, a mystery.
An analysis by Witte indicates that, after four years, the two groups are not
random samples either of those who joined the program or of those who applied
and were turned down four years earlier. But no adjustment is made in the Greene
study for their differences.
Actually, in the end, Greene and his colleagues acknowledge that it is not
choice that has produced the results - if, in deed, there are any results after
the methodological flaws are factored out. They write, "The disruption of
switching schools and adjusting to new murines and expectations may hinder
improvement in test scores in the first year or two of being in a choice
school. Education benefits accumulate and multiply with the passage of time."
Certainly, one cannot take issue with this statement. On the other hand, this
statement means that attributing the results to "choice" is an ideological
decision, not one based on the data. Many of the students who were not choice
students had experienced "the disruption of switching schools" many times during
the four years. To draw the conclusions that they did, Peterson and his
colleagues would have needed another group of students demographically similar
to the choice group but who had been in the same public school for four years.
Kathryn Stearns, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation and a resident of
London, penned one article that suggests that choice in England has had all the
outcomes its detractors predicted? The schools that people choose (which she
says are not always the effective ones) do, indeed, thrive. But since these
schools have limited opportunities to grow, they soon become overcrowded, and so
they end up choosing the students that they think will give them the least
trouble. Such stratification is a commonly predicted negative
outcome of
choice plans in this country.
Middle-class parents, much more than working-class parents, are using their
choice options, but Stearns doesn't think it's because they are better educated
or more interested in their children's education. She thinks that the reason the
middle class exercises its options to a greater degree is that poor people are
more likely to see the local school as central to their communities.
Contrary to what market theory would predict, none of the unpopular British
schools have closed. They simply serve a clientele that is increasingly more
difficult to educate, and they serve that clientele less well. Writes Stearns,
"The gains for certain individuals have come at the expense of others and at the
expense of the community as a whole. The legislation has led to increased social
segregation, and this, in turn, is leading to greater inequality of attainment.
. . . If the British experience is any guide - and I think it is - abandoning
the urban schools to the whims of the marketplace won't improve the lot of most
students or the administration of urban education." Exactly.
New Data
The past year was an even quieter year for new data about schools than the
previous one. The data from the Third International Mathematics and Science
Study are due to be released soon - probably in December - but most data
analyses this year were rehashes of old, sometimes quite old, material.
Threatened with annihilation by the Gingrich gang, the U.S. Department of
Education finally got around to looking at what the data said about education.
Even though most overall trends were up, Emerson Elliott, then-commissioner of
the National Center for Education Statistics, would commit himself to saying
only that "some conditions are improving, while others are not."(14) The
Washington Post, never quick with a good word for schools, looked at Elliott's
data and awarded the schools an editorial with the headline "A B+ for the
Schools."(15)
Indeed, it seems a bit misleading to say only that things are getting better,
except where they aren't. Most of the conditions that have showed no improvement
or have worsened have to do with differences between various subgroups - the gap
between the achievement of blacks and that of whites or between children of
high-income families and children of low-income families, and so on. More
misleading is the tendency of The Condition of Education to date improvements
from the appearance of A Nation at Risk in 1983. This gives the impression that
the report caused the changes that led to the improvements. Such a causal
attribution would make sense in view of the furor caused by the "paper Sputnik."
It would also be convenient to link changes to a concrete event, such as the
publication of the report. It's all very convenient, but it's wrong: most of the
upward trends had begun before A Nation at Risk appeared.
One piece of good news in The Condition of Education is that, despite
continuing immigration by people with limited proficiency in English, the
difference between white and Hispanic reading scores in the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been declining consistently since 1975. (The
difference increased from 1990 to 1992, but the change is small enough that it
could be a blip.) The gap between white and Hispanic mathematics scores has also
been declining since 1973.
More disturbing, the gap between the scores of black students and those of
white students declined from 1975 to 1988 but increased in 1990 and again in
1992. Moreover, that gap remains large: black 17-year-olds score just below
white 13-year-olds on the NAEP mathematics test.
Although the SAT does not measure school outcomes, people are interested in
its vagaries, and so I note here that SAT scores rose in 1996 for the third year
in a row, moving up two points on the math section and one point on the verbal.
In 1996, 1,084,725 students took the test, about 17,000 more than in 1995.
Although the scores are reported this year using the recentered scale only,
changes in scores are the same as they would have been using the old scale.
As in the past two years, rising scores did not garner the media attention
that declining scores have. Only USA Today thought the news worthy of the front
page. The New York Times and the Washington Times buried the story deep in the
front sections, while the Washington Post, as has been its custom for three
years running, relegated its article to the Metro section - material of only
local interest. Only the Washington Times thought it necessary to comment on the
recentering, featuring a long quote from former assistant secretary of education
Chester Finn, Jr., declaring the test "mined."
A few words are probably needed about that much-ballyhooed recentering. Every
five years or so, the makers of commercial achievement tests "renorm" them. This
is essentially what the College Board did in its recentering, but it was the
first such adjustment since the standards were set on the SAT in 1941 and the
average raw score was assigned a scaled score of 500. The group taking the SAT
in 1941, though, was by no means "average." It consisted of 10,654 white
students living in the Northeast and planning to attend primarily Ivy League and
Seven Sisters colleges. Sixty percent were male, and 40% had attended private
college-prep schools.
Currently, 30% of SAT-takers are minorities, 52% are women, 83% have attended
public schools, and 41% report an annual family income of $ 40,000 or less.
Obviously, the 500 "average" from the 1941 elite does not represent the average
score of this much more representative, much more heterogeneous, group. The
College Board quite reasonably decided to make 500 represent the average score
once again. This decision unleashed a torrent of irrational criticism that it
was trying to hide poor performance. "The largest dose of educational Prozac
ever administered," commented Chester Finn at the time. I am certain, however,
that, if we could step back to 1941 and administer the SAT to a group
demographically the same as those who took the SAT in 1995, the 1941 group would
score substantially lower.
As it is, some students will actually get lower scores on the SAT math
section with the recentered scale than they would have gotten with the original
scale. This is because over the last 15 years there was enormous growth in the
proportion of students scoring above 650 on the math section. In The Candidate's
Handbook, 1996, a publication of the Heritage Foundation, Denis Doyle attributes
this growth to Asian American students. However, even a cursory look at the data
would have shown him that Asian students constitute far too few test-takers to
account for such growth. In fact, 6.8% of non-Asian test-takers scored above 650
in 1981, while 10.8% of non-Asians scored that high (on the old scale) in 1995,
a 57% increase. In any case, the recentering pulls some of these students down -
though not by much: students obtaining scores between 660 and 710 would have
scored about 10 points higher on the old scale.
As a practical matter, the recentering means that a student who gets 500
knows that he or she is typical. On the old scale, this 500 would convert to 420
on the verbal scale and 470 on the math. These scores could well lead students
to conclude that they are below average, given that 500 is considered average.
But the old 500 was "average" only for the tiny elite who took the test in 1941.
Secretary Riley as Rip Van Winkle
Secretary of Education Richard Riley must have been pleased with the press
coverage he got when he released trend data from The Condition of Education.
After all, when in previous recorded history had the Washington Post accorded a
grade as high as a B+ to the schools? Maybe Riley thought he could use the
tactic again a few months later to emphasize more good news. While his tactic
didn't work on the Post, articles turned up in a number of newspapers on June 18
and 19 reporting that, in comparison to other nations, American youngsters read
very well. The Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle carried the story in
their front sections, while USA Today displayed the story prominently on the
front page.(16) "U.S. High in Literacy," trumpeted the Houston Chronicle. One
wonders whether Newt Gingrich saw the story. Clearly, IBM's Gerstner did not. At
a conference in July 1996, Virginia Gov. George Allen quoted Gerstner as saying,
"We can teach them work skills. What is killing us is teaching them how to
read."
The reports on reading performance were true, of course. But the only reason
they qualified as news was that the papers had ignored the story the first time
around. When the study was actually "news," only Education Week and USA Today
covered it at all, and the USA Today story came complete with a quote from
Francie Alexander, then-deputy assistant secretary of education, dismissing the
results. On the phone, Los Angeles Times reporter Josh Greenberg said that he
and his editors were suspicious of the story, given that it was four years old,
but decided to go with it anyway as no one seemed to know anything about it. In
that, Greenberg and his editors were certainly right. The data were those from
the 1991 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement
(IEA) study, released in July of 1992 as How in the World Do Students Read?
The Media
Relatively speaking, the past year was a good media year for us
"contrarians." Contrarians was the label affixed to me, David Berliner, Harold
Hodgkinson, Harold Howe II, Richard Jaeger, and Iris Rotberg on the cover of the
May 1996 issue of the American Association of School Administrators' magazine,
The School Administrator - along with the title "The Leading Defenders of
America's Public Schools." The issue celebrated the 200th anniversary of Horace
Mann's birth, and we all contributed articles. AASA Executive Director Paul
Houston contributed a cover essay in which he observed something with which we
contrarians all agree: "American education has many challenges and failings.
They just don't happen to be the ones about which most of our citizens have been
told." Houston wants to expand this issue into a book.
The cover of the November/December 1995 issue of Teacher magazine featured
large, hot-pink type against a black background, which asked the question "Is
the School Crisis a Fraud?" The article for the most part featured Berliner's
work and mine and revealed an interesting change in tactics by our detractors
and by school critics in general. In the early days of our research, the critics
labored arduously to ignore us. (Some still use this tactic; in
her 1995 book,
National Standards and American Education, Diane Ravitch alludes to us in
several places but never mentions any of the six contrarians by name.) At the
same time, they clobbered schools with ranks and numbers: "American high
schoolers come in last or next to last in virtually every economic measure,"
said Gerstner and his colleagues. "International examinations designed to
compare students from all over the world usually show American students at or
near the bottom," said Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT). 17
These statements are typical. They show how the school-bashers once tried to
use numbers and statistics to show that public schools had failed. Now that the
contrarians have shown repeatedly that these numbers show nothing of the sort,
the critics have shifted their ground and want to declare the numbers
irrelevant. They refer to us as using "numerically driven arguments," as if this
were something inappropriate or even reprehensible when it is precisely what
they once did.
It is true that the more thoughtful commentators in the Teacher article -
among them I number Deborah Meier, David Tyack, David Cohen, and Mike Rose -
called attention to the qualities that numbers cannot measure. But we
contrarians have done so as well. The Third Bracey Report presented Israel
Scheffler's view of the defining characteristics of education, which is worth
repeating:
the formation of habits of judgment and the development of character, the
elevation of standards, the facilitation of understanding, the development of
taste and discrimination, the stimulation of curiosity and wondering, the
fostering of style and a sense of beauty, the growth of a thirst for new ideas
and visions of the yet unknown.
I offered this comment on these features of education: "The extent to which
we accept Scheffler's definition is the extent to which we must realize that,
for all the test scores and graduation statistics presented here and elsewhere,
we really do not have appropriate indices of how the system functions or
dcesn't." 18 But the qualities described in this definition are not the
qualities being published in the New York Times ad with which this report began.
That ad is a "numerically driven argument," and it is those numbers that we
contrarians have rebutted.
At one level, it is unfortunate that Teacher brought in thoughtful critics
because they give the school-bashers who use numerically driven arguments -
Denis Doyle, Chester Finn, Diane Ravitch, Albert Shanker, and so on - an
undeserved credibility by association with genuine scholars.
Shanker, in fact, provided the most stunning example of hypocrisy in
connection with numerically driven arguments. When I spoke to the Education
Press Association in 1995 and presented as many statistics as I could wedge into
an hour, Shanker spoke next. Shanker, who in 1993 had already written such
statements as "The achievement of U.S. students in grades K-12 is very poor" and
"American students are performing at much lower levels than students in other
industrialized nations," now discarded all use of actual data. He recounted how
he kept meeting young people who could not make change and having other
"personal experiences" that repudiated my data. "Frankly," said Shanker, "I find
these experiences more compelling than waving his arm at the screen where my
graphs had appeared all those numbers that Jerry just put up
there." And yet,
when Laurence Steinberg and Lawrence Stedman wrote numerically driven opinions
recapitulating the usual litany of charges against schools, Shanker grabbed the
numbers as a drowning man grabs riot-sam and used them in three of his weekly
paid advertorials in the Sunday New York Times.
One media curiosity continued this past year and warrants a brief comment.
When a report by or an article about the contrarians appears, rebutters are
always brought in for "balance." When a report comes out that is critical of the
schools, the media almost always play it straight, without opposing commentary.
To my knowledge, only once has anyone ever called me or any of the
"revisionists" to comment on such a negative report. Strangely enough, that was
the conservative Washington Times, and it gave my retort almost as much space as
the report the story was about. 19
As for positive media coverage, the New York Times ran a long article on the
con-trarians, and Newsweek essayist Robert Samuelson titled one of his articles
about us "Three Cheers for the Schools?" 20 In his essay, Samuelson referred to
me as the "godfather" of the contrarians, which is amusing but not historically
accurate. Samuelson could not bring himself to give the schools three cheers,
but he did declare flatly that much of the crisis rhetoric had been overblown.
Even Better Homes and Gardens got into the act with "The Good News About Our
Schools," a surprisingly meaty and accurate piece, and I finally managed to pry
open the door of the Washington Post op-ed page after five years of trying. 21
In speeches and workshops, I generally excoriate the media for their
susceptibility to the Worst Possible Spin Syndrome (WPSS). At the same time I
tell audiences that the most balanced and most extensive coverage of education
in the country appears in USA Today. USA Today, sometimes accused of rendering
sound bites on paper, often includes two-page inserts on education, and for the
week of 13 May 1996 it ran a weeklong series. 22
As part of its weeklong series, USA Today conducted a survey of parents and
children and found that, overall, both groups gave schools a grade no lower than
B- on a variety of elements. (For example, parents awarded this low grade to the
superintendent, the school board, the budget process, and the way students treat
one another.) Indeed, 75% of parents awarded their children's schools either an
A or a B. The survey did show, though, that elementary school parents are much
more satisfied with their children's schools than are secondary school parents.
For instance, 42% of secondary school parents said that schools did not prepare
students adequately for the world of work, and 38% said that schools did not
prepare students adequately for college. Perhaps because of the temporal
distance of elementary school parents from these realms, these complaints were
voiced by only 16% of elementary school parents. Thirty-two percent of secondary
school parents felt that their children were not challenged to learn, but only
17% of elementary school parents felt that way.
On the downside, fully 33% of the students said that getting good grades does
not make you popular, and only 31% said that they did an hour or more of
homework nightly. Forty-seven percent of the parents, despite giving high marks
to the public schools, said that they would send their children to private
schools if they could afford it.
Overall, though, even the editorial page of USA Today was surprisingly
upbeat. I say surprisingly because in five years that page has never published
any of the many articles and letters to the editor that I have
submitted, nor
had they previously said anything positive. But above a May 13 editorial three
times the normal length, USA Today's headline read, "U.S. Schools Can't Teach?
Don't Believe the Myths." The opening paragraph read: "It's time to set the
record straight. Schools have been getting a bad rap over the past decade or so,
fueled by some myths that have been around so long they're often accepted as
fact." 23 Tell me about it.
There are several things to take into account about the USA Today survey.
First, it asked parents only about schools their children attend, and parents
are consistently more positive about their own children's schools than about the
schools elsewhere in the nation. This is probably because of two other factors:
1) people depend on the national media for information about the nation's
schools, and the national media accentuate the negative; and 2) people depend
much more on local sources for information about local schools. 24
Second, it is a somewhat superficial survey. Recall that the Public Agenda
Foundation in its 1995 report Assignment Incomplete found that, when the
researchers started to scratch the surface of public support, it was very thin.
Third, some of the questions posed vague hypothetical situations. Would 47%
of parents really send their children to private schools if they could afford
it? We have no idea what kind of financial picture the respondents held in their
minds when considering this possibility. Would a fully paid tuition allow them
to "afford" it? Would their overall economic comfort level have to rise also? We
don't know, but we do know that people often respond to hypothetical situations
differently from the way they do when confronted with a reality.
My salute to USA Today is not meant to suggest here that the media have
finally stopped bashing schools. There continued to be much "gratuitous
violence" visited upon the schools. Gratuitous violence is a phrase I use to
describe articles that are written about something that has nothing to do with
schools but that contains a slap at the schools nonetheless.
And the media still remain prone to WPSS. Typical of WPSS was the way the
media handled the NAEP history assessment released in November 1995. The
Washington Post headlined its story "Knowing the Past May Be History, U.S. Test
Reveals." 25 Rene Sanchez, the Post education writer, opened the story with
these words: "The nation's students have received a dismal report card in
American history." Sanchez' comment was mild compared to that of Lewis Lapham,
editor of Harper's Magazine, who took to the op-ed page of the New York Times
and began his essay as follows: "If it is true that American democracy requires
the existence of an electorate that knows something about American history, the
news last month from the Department of Education can be read as a coroner's
report." 26
As with Gingrich, one wonders how Lapham would have characterized American
democracy a century ago, when the high school graduation rate was 3%. In a
letter rejecting an article I had submitted for publication, Lapham apologized
for overstating the case. Why is it that overstated charges against the
schools are always made in a public foram, while apologies for the errors are
made only in private?
In response to these comments, I took to the op-ed page of the Washington
Post with this quote:
A large majority of students showed that they had virtually no knowledge of
elementary aspects of American history. They could not identify Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Theodore Roosevelt. . . . Most of our students do
not have the faintest notion of what this country looks like. St. Louis was
placed on the Pacific Ocean, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, the Atlantic Ocean, Ohio
River, St. Lawrence River, and almost every place else. 27
This quote could have come from an article on the 1995 NAEP history report,
but it didn't. It appeared in a New York Times article about a survey of history
knowledge that the Times itself had commissioned. The Times was incensed at the
outcomes, and it put the story on the front page, next to its other major
headline of the day: "Patton Attacks East of El Guettar." The date was 4 April
1943.
In that wartime survey, only 3% of the students could accurately list the
states of the East Coast. Asked to identify the occupation of Walt Whitman, the
students pegged him as a missionary to the Far East, a pioneer, a colonizer, an
explorer, a speculator, a famous cartoonist, an unpatriotic writer, a musician,
the father of blank verse, an English poet, and a columnist. Hundreds of
students, according to the Times report, listed Whitman as being an orchestra
leader. Since the Times made no further comment on this last item, we may assume
that the editors did not make the connection to Paul Whiteman, a popular
bandleader of the day.
What really made these results outrageous was that they came not from high
school seniors, but from college freshmen. Although the article didn't address
graduation rates, the high school graduation rate at the time stood at 45%, and
only about 15% of those who graduated went on to college. The Times survey had
uncovered not just a group of ignoramuses, but an elite group of ignoramuses.
I do not tell this story here in order to defend ignorance. Yet in my book
Final Exam: A Study of the Perpetual Scrutiny of American Education, I showed
that the last century has seen an almost unbroken march of progress in terms of
how much people know (the decade from 1965 to 1975 is the lone exception). 28
But we are not a nation of learners, nor have we ever been. And if you wish to
know why, just read the base of the Statue of Liberty. It does not say, "Give me
your college grads, your 1,300 SAT scorers yearning to learn." Indeed, we are
closer to being a nation of learners today than at any time in the past. The
progress we have made with the huddled masses of the whole world is
extraordinary. It is only recently that many educated citizens of other nations
have begun to migrate to our shores.
In the opening paragraphs of "The Media's Myth of School Failure," I
described how members of the media fell all over one another trying to get out
the report of an international comparison in math and science and how not one
media outlet had reported the international reading comparison released five
months later - the one Secretary Riley finally touted this year. 29 Why the
difference? Well, it could be that the U.S. ranks were mostly (but not entirely)
low in math and science, while American students ranked second in reading among
31 nations.
Or could it be that good news is just not news to the American media? That's
what it sounds like to U.S. Department of Education staffers Laurence Ogle and
Patricia Dabbs. They described what happened when a generally positive geography
assessment issued forth from the NAEP. "The geography press
conference was
attended by the President of the National Geographic Society, and the mood of
almost all the speakers was clearly upbeat. . . . The reporting in the press,
however, was lackluster and negative, at best. Few news agencies picked up the
story." But when the history results came out two weeks later, not only did Rene
Sanchez call the results "dismal" and Lapham declare them "a coroner's report,"
but reporters beat down the doors to get to talk with Ogle and Dabbs:
Returning to our offices after the press conference, we found our voice mail
jam-packed with media requests for additional information. News accounts were on
the radio, and reports were even spotted on the Interact. Requests for
additional information flooded in from radio and television stations,
newspapers, and a few talk-show hosts. That evening, reports on the history
results were seen on the network newscasts, public television, and later in the
week, on the political talk shows from Washington. . . . Even television's
late-night comedy king, Jay Leno, spoke about (and ridiculed) the results.
Clearly, the coverage of the negative news eclipsed the relatively good news
about geography. 30
This is worse than the reading versus mash and science reporting I had
described. In that case, the media were simply ignoring the good news. Here,
they stand accused of confabulating bad news: "Students Fall Short in NAEP
Geography Test," declared the front-page headline of the Education Week story.
31
Unfortunately, as that Education Week headline suggests, it is not just the
general media that are subject to capriciousness. When The Manufactured Crisis,
by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, appeared, Education Week carried a story
deep inside the edition about the tome that would win the Book of the Year award
from the American Educational Research Association. Education Week editor Ronald
Wolk panned the book in Teacher magazine in a review that made one wonder if he
had read it. He called this most compendious source of data a "polemic." Though
parts of it are written in an impassioned style, it is surely data-based and
certainly not a "polemic." Yet when Beyond the Classroom, by Laurence Steinberg
and others, appeared - a book barely deserving of the word "research" -
Education Week ran it as a front-page story. 32
Events
The year was even quieter for events than it was for data. The event that
everyone watched for with great anticipation was the "summit." In advance,
people said it would probably be the most important policy-related event since
the 1989 summit in Charlottesville between President Bush and the nation's
governors.
The summit was tightly guarded, with each of 41 attending governors bringing
along a chosen business leader to an IBM facility in Palisades, New York,
provided by IBM's Gerstner. Some 30 "resource people" were also invited to
attend. The list read like a Who's Who of the Right. From the beginning, it was
clear that the governors were abandoning a lot of previous work. (Since few of
them were sitting governors at the time of the 1989 summit, "abandon" might not
be the best word for their inaction.) Claudio Sanchez, National Public Radio
education reporter, described the activity with some small incredulity in his
voice. Asked by the host of "All Things Considered" if the summit's outcome
meant we would have 50 sets of standards instead of one, Sanchez replied that it
could mean that we would have 16,000 sets of standards, one for
each district.
One could almost hear Sanchez shrugging his shoulders.
It might be telling that, in an advertorial just after the summit, American
Federation of Teachers president and resource person Shanker felt obligated to
acknowledge the charge that nothing happened at the meeting in order to deny it.
Resource person Diane Ravitch was emphatic that something actually had happened,
even if it was wrong:
One theme was repeatedly sounded at the recent education summit in Palisades,
New York: national standards are dead. Apparently, the United States should have
50 state standards or even 16,000 local standards. But no national standards.
The governors, Democratic and Republican, said it; the President said it. And
they are all wrong. 33
After this opening subtlety, Ravitch went on to try and revive the corpse of
national standards. She was joined in her effort a couple of weeks later by
Shanker in another of his weekly advertorials in the Sunday New York Times.
Whether they have succeeded or ever will is not yet clear. Education, seldom
able to hold the spotlight in turbulent political times, has been muscled off
stage by welfare reform and the Presidential election campaign. Whether Ravitch
and Shanker can transform the corpse of national standards into a living mummy
probably won't be known until after the election.
Meanwhile, at a July meeting, the governors formally agreed to construct an
"entity" to provide "technical assistance in the areas of standards,
assessments, accountability, and the use of technology in schools." 34 The
governors did not give the "entity" a name, a staff, or a budget. Their earlier
thinking was that the staff and budget would be small, but how a low-budget
"entity" with only a few staff members can do all the things projected for it is
not clear.
A number of events this year should have ramifications for education. But
they are now percolating through the culture without any clear indication yet of
what they will ultimately mean. I number among these events the Million Man
March, the Stand for Children Day, and the various meetings of the Promise
Keepers.
Education and Immigration
As this is written, our nation of immigrants seems intent on beating up on
today's immigrants. There are few arenas in which those wishing to attain
political popularity spew out disinformation more frequently than in the realm
of immigration. Most people believe that immigrants are arriving in record
numbers and rates (false), that most immigrants enter illegally (false), that
most end up on welfare (false), that they take jobs from natives (false), and
that they earn most of the doctorates in science and engineering (true). My
facts come from Immigration: The Demographic and Economic Facts, by Julian
Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland. 35
The monograph is a compilation of original work by Simon as well as other
research.
Critics often use the doctorate statistic to declare that American students
don't like science anymore. Actually, the number of doctorates awarded to
native-born students soared between 1963 and 1972. The number then fell just as
dramatically until 1983 and has been increasing substantially
since then. The
number of doctorates awarded in science and engineering to native-born students
was just under 2,000 in 1958, just under 6,000 in 1972, just over 3,000 in 1983,
and just under 5,000 in 1993. Doctorates awarded to for-eign-born students
showed mostly slow, steady growth from 1958 (when the number was about 300),
then began to surge in 1983, and exceeded the figure for U.S.-born students in
1989. Foreigners now receive about 60% of the doctorates in science and
engineering. About half of these students become citizens or permanent
residents.
Science and engineering are areas in which immigrants are in competition with
natives. As I have reported each year since the Second Bracey Report, despite
continued predictions of shortages (a hoax in itself), there is a glut of
doctorates in these fields. This year, science writer and newsletter publisher
Daniel Greenberg comments that "the paucity of solutions to the Ph.D. glut is
surely one of the wonders of the great American university system. The common
wisdom in the ivy-covered realm is that the problem will correct itself when
students wise up to the grim job situation and stop coming." 36 That hasn't
happened yet - for Americans or for foreigners.
Overall, fewer of the current immigrants belong to the "huddled masses." The
proportion of aliens with eight years or less of education has dropped from 35%
to 25%, while the proportion with 16 years or more has risen from 17% to 30%.
Immigrants do constitute a larger proportion of undereducated residents than
previously, however, because the proportion of undereducated native-born
Americans has fallen more rapidly in the same 30-year period, from 37% to 11%.
The number of immigrants entering the U.S. has risen rapidly since 1980, and
the number entering annually is now about the same as it was in 1910. The number
of immigrants entering in one year peaked in 1916. The numbers declined
precipitously after World War I, again at the onset of the Great Depression, and
yet again as World War II began.
We call ourselves "a nation of immigrants" but forget how much more literally
true this was in the early years of this century. In 1850 immigrants made up
9.7% of the population. By 1860 the figure had leapt to 13.2%. The proportion
peaked in 1900 at 14.7%, and in 1990 it was 7.9%, up from a record low of 4.7%
in 1970.
As for illegals, while it is tough to get a completely accurate fix, most
estimates run from one-fourth to one-third of the total. Six out of 10 illegal
immigrants enter legally as students, visitors, or temporary workers and become
illegal only when their visas expire. Thus no more than 13% of all immigrants
actually enter the country illegally.
For those between the ages of 15 and 65, the welfare rates for immigrants are
lower than they are for natives. They are substantially higher for immigrants
over 65, but that group constitutes a small proportion of immigrants. The
overwhelming majority of immigrants are between the ages of 5 and 45 - most of
them, between 10 and 40. Welfare rates are much higher for immigrants who are
also refugees, but they are a tiny proportion of all immigrants.
Immigrants rarely have any negative impact on the availability of jobs or on
the wages paid. Only in markets with high rates of immigration and stagnant
economies do immigrants have an adverse impact, lowering the ability of blacks
to obtain jobs or good wages.
Certainly immigration puts strains on some school systems. Districts that
have to deal with large numbers of students whose native language is not English
or with a student body that represents a hundred native languages unquestionably
bear an extra burden. Overall, though, immigration remains a boon to the
country. Simon and Stephen Moore surveyed top economists around the country -
including 38 who had been either president of the American Economic Association
or on the President's Council of Economic Advisers - regarding their opinions
about immigration. Eighty percent said immigration had been very beneficial to
the economic growth of the nation, and 20% said that it had been slightly
beneficial. Asked what we should do about current immigration rates, 58% said
increase them, 33% said keep them the same, and 11% said they didn't know. None
said lower the rate. 37
Education and the Economy
While immigration is an arena rife with myths, the status and future of the
economy have sprouted their own collection of old wives' tales that suck in
people who should know better. In the October 11 edition of USA Today, President
Clinton and Vice President Gore co-signed a letter to the editor claiming that
by 2000 "60% of all jobs will require advanced technological skills." They did
not elaborate on what "advanced technological skills" meant. I wrote to Messrs.
Clinton and Gore and also to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Secretary of
Education Riley asking for a citation for the figure mentioned. My quartet of
epistles produced only one response. Staff members at the U.S. Department of
Education wrote to say that they were certain that the Department of Labor could
provide the answer. It did not.
But it is clear that Clinton and Gore were not using job projection figures
from the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment Outlook: 1994-2005. 38 That
document shows that, while jobs requiring college education will grow at a
faster rate than jobs that require less schooling, these jobs are mostly not
high-tech jobs, and the occupations that account for the largest numbers of jobs
remain low-skilled. Cashiers, janitors, and retail sales positions are the big
three. (These findings are reported in more detail in the January 1996 Kappan
Research column.) An earlier publication had listed retail sales as the top job
and found that it would account for one-third more jobs than the 10
fastest-growing jobs combined. "Systems analyst" is the only high-tech
occupation that is both rapidly growing and offering a large number of jobs.
Statistics like these don't stop people like IBM's Gerstner from running
around like Chicken Little, screaming that the system is broken. Even more
numerous are the people who are running around claiming that we need high
standards in order to facilitate - this year's hottest buzz phrase - the
"school-to-work transition."
Elsewhere I have declared that schools should not prepare students for work.
I offered the following arguments. 39
* Schools should return to the civic function that Jefferson argued they
should fill. "In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some
germ of corruption and degeneracy which cunning will discover and wickedness
insensibly open, cultivate and improve," Jefferson wrote in his 1732 plan for
education in Virginia. Governments of rulers degenerate, and thus the power must
be invested in the people. To prevent the germ of degeneracy from infecting the
people, a nation must see to it that the people are educated. A
nation
educated as Jefferson envisioned would contain people properly suspicious of
power.
* Most work lacks any intrinsic value, and most workers would not choose to
do it. It is dull, boring, and even dangerous, and - while that is an
inescapable fact of life - schools should not collude with business to prepare
children to endure job outcomes such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
A good commentary on work can be found in the comic strip "Dilbert," which
already appears in 800 newspapers and is still the fastest-growing strip in the
country. Dilbert and his buddies work for a company that has endless arbitrary
and capricious rules, defective products, heartless accountants, and
backstabbing co-workers. In one sequence, Dilbert suggests to a co-worker that
they quit and set up their own business. "Why quit?" asks Dilbert's pal. "We can
run our new company from our cubicles and get paid too." "Wouldn't that be
immoral?" asks Dilbert. "That's only an issue for people who aren't already in
hell," replies the co-worker.
Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," put his Interact address in the strip
and has been deluged with letters asking, "How did you know where I worked?"
Apparently a lot of workers also think they're already in hell.
Study after study has found the American worker to be the most productive in
the world. It is when the workers leave the workplace that they become Joe and
Josie Sixpack, watch mindless television, and engage in other brain-numbing
activities. Even if the current predictions about increases in leisure time
(they seem to be coming true in Europe if not here yet) are wrong, schools
should provide a liberal, not technical, education. Schools should educate
students to enjoy a rich, thoughtful life, alone and in groups.
Incidentally, in this connection - to borrow the title of an article
debunking the book promulgating the myth - "Bowling Alone Is Bunk." Peter Hong
of the Los Angeles Times visited bowling lanes and found them thriving. The
creator of the "bowling alone" myth constructed it with statistics. 40 In the
past, group participation had been associated with higher levels of education.
But in recent years, while educational levels have been rising, group
participation hasn't risen as much. Thus, statistically adjusting for education,
participation rates drop, but this is a statistical outcome that is not
validated in reality.
Actually, the American softball league reported a rise from 27 million to 40
million participants between 1972 and 1990. Participation in sports and
professional groups grew dramatically between 1974 and 1994. Only church-related
groups, among 15 types of groups, showed a large drop. Even participation in
literary/art groups increased.
* Business leaders are, once again, confusing training with education and
asking schools to train young people. And in their arguments, they often operate
disingenuously. Sam Ginn of Pacific Telesis likes to tell audiences about the
time that his company gave a reading test to 6,400 job applicants - and only
2,800 passed. Ginn says this means we have to do more in schools. What Ginn
doesn't tell his audiences is that he had only 700 positions to fill. His test
found four times more qualified applicants than there were jobs
available.
More important, Ginn doesn't tell audiences that his jobs paid only $ 7 an
hour, which works out to a little over $ 14,000 a year. Does he really expect
America's literati to show up for such jobs? Ginn's attitude was captured nicely
in a "Frank and Ernest" cartoon in which a personnel officer tells Frank and
Ernest, "What we want are people who are smart enough to pass our aptitude test
and dumb enough to work for what we pay."
In his farewell speech as President, Dwight Eisenhower warned of the
"mili-tary-industrial complex." Were he alive today, he would no doubt issue a
new warning about the "government-industrial complex." The government sometimes
appears to have forgotten that education should accomplish something other than
the agenda of the National Alliance for Business, the Business Roundtable, etc.
To borrow the words of a now-infamous report, "If an unfriendly foreign power
had attempted to impose" such a narrow agenda on our schools, "we might well
have viewed it as an act of war."
* Vocational information could be dispensed and training accomplished much
more effectively at vocational centers that operate full time and to which
students could go after high school (or after college, for that matter). A
number of vocational educators have responded favorably when I have posed such a
notion, although the Journal of Vocational Education, after commissioning the
article containing this proposal, ultimately rejected it because the editor felt
it would be too threatening to readers.
* Research from cognitive psychology, especially the literature on the
transfer of training, strongly suggests that general training is not effective.
The lack of effectiveness of vocational training seems even more likely, given
the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that most skilled jobs will require
extensive on-the-job training, no matter what the educational level of the job
holder.
The fact is that schools have done a fabulous job on the supply side -
providing business and industry with greater numbers of highly productive
workers than they can use. Business and industry have done a poor job on the
demand side. President Clinton is currently bragging about the 10 million jobs
his Administration has created, but each month, as the Department of Labor
announces more job creation, there is also a report that most of these jobs are
in the low-paying service sector.
As has become a tradition in Presidential election years, this issue of the
Kappan carries essays outlining the positions of the two major party candidates.
This year's essays will carry the bylines of the Clinton/Gore '96 Campaign and
Bob Dole. If nothing has changed since this was written in August, it would be
more honest to say that the real authors were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Before he signed the monstrous welfare reform bill, President Clinton rejected
others on the ground that they hurt children too much. Elsewhere, Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich has declared, "No civilization can survive with 12-year-olds
having babies, 14-year-olds doing drugs, 15-year-olds killing each other,
17-year-olds dying of AIDS, and 18-year-olds receiving diplomas they can't read.
All of those things are happening in America today." 41 Both parties seem
focused on youth. It will be interesting to see what the next Administration
brings to - or aims at - our schools.
1. Edward W. Desmond, "The Failed Miracle," Time, 22 April
1996, pp. 60-66.
2. Paul George, The Japanese Secondary School: A Closer Look (Columbus, Ohio:
National Middle School Association; and Reston, Va.: National Association of
Secondary School Principals, 1995).
3. Susan Goya, "The Secret of Japanese Education," Phi Delta Kappan, October
1993, pp. 126-29.
4. Susan Elbert, "Education in Japan Intolerant of Departures from Rigid
Norm," New Canaan (Conn.) Advertiser, 7 December 1995, p. B-17.
5. Mary Jordan, "School Bell Takes Its Toll in South Korea," Washington Post,
7 May 1996, p. A-1.
6. Dennis Kelly, "Parents, Students Grade America's Public Schools," USA
Today, 13 May 1996, p. 8-A.
7. Mark Buechler, Charter Schools: Legislation and Results After Four Years
(Indianapolis: Education Policy Center, Indiana University, 1995).
8. Chester E. Finn, Jr., Louann Bierlein, and Bruno V. Manno, "Charter
Schools in Action: A First Look," Hudson Briefing Paper, January 1996.
9. Jeffrey Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limitations of the Market
Metaphor, paperback ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p.
232. Chatter schools are not mentioned in the earlier hard-bound edition.
10. Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America's
Schools (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), p. 167.
11. John F. Witte, Troy D. Sterr, and Christopher A. Thorn, Fifth-Year
Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison: Department of Political
Science, University of Wisconsin, December 1995), p. 14.
12. Peter Cookson, School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American
Education (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).
13. Kathryn Stearns, "School Choice: Survival of the Fittest," Washington
Post, 25 November 1995, p. A-25.
14. National Center for Education Statistics, "Commissioner's Statement," The
Condition of Education 1995 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education,
1995), p. ix.
15. "A B.sub.+ for the Schools," Washington Post, 26 August 1995, p. A-12.
16. Josh Greenberg, "U.S. Students Rank #2 in Literacy," Los Angeles Times,
18 June 1996, p. A-5; idem, "U.S. High in Literacy," Houston Chronicle, 19 June
1996, p. A-4; and Mike Madden, "U.S. Students Finish Second in Reading Test,"
USA Today, 18 June 1996, p. A-1.
17. Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., et al., Reinventing Education (New York: Dutton,
1994), p. 5; and Albert Shanker, "The Wrong Message," New York Times, 11 July
1993, Sect. 4, p. 7.
18. Gerald W. Bracey, "The Third Bracey Report on the Condition of
Education," Phi Delta Kappan, October 1993, p. 110.
19. Carol Innerst, "U.S. Classrooms Fail Economy," Washington Times, 12 April
1995, p. A-4.
20. Peter Applebome, "Have Schools Failed? Revisionists Use Army of
Statistics to Argue No," New York Times, 13 December 1995, p. B-12; and Robert
J. Samuelson, "Three Cheers for the Schools?," Newsweek, 4 December 1995, p. 54.
21. Nick Gallo, "The Good News About Our Schools," Better Homes and Gardens,
March 1996, pp. 56-58; and Gerald W. Bracey, "U.S. Students: Better Than Ever,"
Washington Post, 22 December 1995, p. A-19.
22. See Dennis Kelly, "Poll Finds Mix of Good, Bad, and Mediocre," USA Today,
13-17 May 1996, p. 1-A.
23. "U.S. Schools Can't Teach? Don't Believe the Myths," USA Today, 13 May
1996, p. 14-A.
24. Survey conducted for the American Association of School Administrators by
Mellman, Lazarus, and Lake, January 1994. As Kappan readers are already aware,
numerous Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup polls have shown similarly favorable attitudes
toward local schools and especially toward the schools people's own children
attend.
25. Rene Sanchez, "Knowing the Past May Be History, U.S. Test Reveals,"
Washington Post, 2 November 1995, p. 1.
26. Lewis H. Lapham, "Ignorance Passes the Point of No Return," New York
Times, 2 December 1995, p. A-21.
27. Bracey, "U.S. Students: Better Than Ever," p. A-19.
28. Gerald W. Bracey, Final Exam: A Study of the Perpetual Scrutiny of
American Education (Bloomington, Ind.: TECHNOS Press of the Agency for
Instructional Technology, 1995), pp. 15-77.
29. Gerald W. Bracey, "The Media's Myth of School Failure," Educational
Leadership, September 1994, pp. 80-83.
30. Laurence Ogle and Patricia Dabbs, "Good News, Bad News: Does Media
Coverage of the Schools Promote Scattershot Remedies?," Education Week, 13 March
1996, p. 46.
31. Millicent Lawton, "Students Fall Short on NAEP Geography Test," Education
Week, 25 October 1995, p. 1.
32. Debra Viadero, "Book That Bucks Negative View of Schools Stirs Debate,"
Education Week, 13 September 1995, p. 8; and idem, "Teen Culture Seen Impeding
School Reform," Education Week, 5 June 1996, p. 1.
33. Diane Ravitch, "50 Ways to Teach Them Grammar," Washington Post, 11 April
1996, p. A-21.
34. Millicent Lawton, "Dodging Controversy, Governors OK 'Entity' Without
Name, Budget," Education Week, 7 August 1996, p. 26.
35. Julian Simon, Immigration: The Demographic and Economic Facts
(Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute and National Immigration Forum, 1995).
36. Daniel S. Greenberg, "Surplus in Science," Washington Post, 6 December
1995, p. A-25.
37. Stephen Moore, "The Case for More Immigrants," in Vernon M. Briggs and
Stephen Moore, eds., Still an Open Door? (Washington, D.C.: American University
Press, 1994).
38. Employment Outlook: 1994-2005 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Labor, Bulletin No. 2472, December 1995).
39. Gerald W. Bracey, "Schools Should Not Prepare Students for Work,"
Rethinking Schools, Summer 1996, p. 11.
40. Robert J. Samuelson, "Bowling Alone Is Bunk," Washington Post, 10 April
1996, p. A-19.
41. Newt Gingrich, "An Open Letter to Republican Delegates," Washington Post,
4 August 1996, p. C-1.
GERALD W. BRACEY is a research psychologist and writer living in the
Washington, D.C., area.