bracy2

ASAP

Phi Delta Kappan

October, 1994

SECTION: Vol. 76 ; No. 2 ; Pg. 114; ISSN: 0031-7217

LENGTH: 12019 words

HEADLINE: The fourth Bracey report on the condition of public education.

BYLINE: Bracey, Gerald W.

BODY:

Mr. Bracey uses new data to continue his demolition work on the hoaxes and myths that mar the public perception of American education.

THE FIRST three Bracey Reports presented a great deal of data that demolished two myths. The first myth was that a Golden Era of American education once existed, from which state of grace we have since fallen and to which state of grace we must struggle to return. The second was that the performance of American students is dreadfully low, both in comparison to Asian and European students and in comparison to the performance of American students in years past.

Of Hoaxes and Myths

This report continues the demolition work. But first I must take note of an even more pervasive hoax. It is one that I fell victim to, as did most of the nation. By itself, the hoax is not so important, but as a symbol it reveals how readily people believe any terrible thing about schools.

In 1986, when I took up residence in the administration building of the school district in Cherry Creek, Colorado, I noticed a sheet of green paper on the bulletin board outside my office. It listed the most pervasive school problems of the 1940s, followed by those of the 1980s. The catalogue of horrors for the 1940s included, in order, talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of place in line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in waste-baskets. The list for the 1980s was dramatically different: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. The paper gave as its source the police department in Fullerton, California. That attribution made me wonder. I had spent five years as a police dispatcher and had consulted for the police department in New York City. And surveys of this sort just didn't seem to be the typical police department activity. But who knew? Maybe police work in California was closer to social science than was the case in New York.

In any case, my puzzlement led no further. Too bad. Had I but thought about it for a moment, I would have noticed that the 1980s list did not apply to the schools in Cherry Creek, a district that sends about 85% of its students on to higher education. Nor did it seem to apply in the neighboring suburban districts, nor in the approximately 150 small-town and rural districts in Colorado. Even in Denver, Colorado's only large city, the list would seem far-fetched. Moreover, there hadn't been much talk of these horrific problems during the decade I had spent in the state department of education in Virginia.

When the lists turned up on a bulletin board at Yale University, they sparked more dissonance in the mind of Professor Barry O'Neill than they had in mine. O'Neill found the 1940s list too trivial, and he was skeptical of the 1980s list. So he decided to seek the source.(1)

After collecting 250 versions of these lists, with various attributions, O'Neill found the lists to be a fabrication of one T. Cullen Davis of Fort Worth. Davis, acquitted of murdering his estranged wife's lover, had taken a hammer to his million-dollar collection of jade and ivory statues, smashing them as idols of false religion. He became a born-again Christian. And he used the lists to attack public schools. Cullen revealed to O'Neill his method of constructing the lists: "How did I know what the offenses in the schools were in 1940? I was there. How do I know what they are now? I read the paper."

But by the time O'Neill elicited this admission, virtually everyone in the nation had adopted the lists as gospel. On the political Right, William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly, Ross Perot, and George Will dutifully cited them. On the Left, Anna Quindlen, Herb Caen, and Carl Rowan trotted them out. They turned up in Time and on CBS television. They were variously attributed to CBS News, CQ Researcher, and the Heritage Foundation. In their migration from Texas to the rest of the nation, the lists did pass through the Fullerton Police Department, which, knowing of the public's anxiety over teenage drug use, moved drugs from their original position as sixth on the 1980s list to number one.

While the problems in schools are certainly more serious today than they were four or five decades ago, they are not the problems that appear on the 1980s list. A warning many researchers receive early in their training applies here: don't trust secondary sources. Perhaps a popular bumper-sticker slogan from the 1960s applies as well: Question Authority.

Having unearthed the lists' source, O'Neill asked a more difficult question: What makes them so popular? He placed his answer in the tradition of the Puritan jeremiads. In these sermons, the preacher would remind the members of the congregation of their covenant with God, then attribute any current afflictions to God's just retribution for the broken covenant, and finally warn them to mend their ways and renew the covenant with God.

Said O'Neill, "Americans today regard their country as the richest, freest, and fairest, with the best social system, but cannot square this with the social problems of America's young. . . . The school lists are a collective moan of anxiety over the gap between ideals and reality. When Puritans or modern Americans enumerate their faults, they are declaring their dedication to their ideals, reassuring each other that at least their goals remain high."

Something similar occurs constantly in education. The state of education is never ideal, and drugs, violence, and pregnancy are problems in ways they never were 50 years ago. As with the lists, the political Right and Left agree on these problems. They part ways on how to solve them. In addition, the tradition of criticizing schools is a long one. From my forays into the history of education, it seems that in the last century such criticism has abated only during World Wars I and II and during the Great Depression, when people had more immediate and more intense things to worry about.

The hoax of the lists was not alone this year. Sam Ginn, chairman of Pacific Telesis, gave speeches declaring that his company had administered a seventh-grade reading test to 6,400 applicants for operator positions and that only 2,700 had passed with a score high enough for him to hire them. This showed, said Ginn, the need for education reform to develop "workers with skills that will allow us to be competitive in the next century."(2)

What Ginn did not say was that his jobs paid only $ 7 an hour. Based on a 40-hour week and a 50-week year, this works out to the princely annual income of $ 14,000, only about 60% of the average starting salary for teachers and a sum slightly below the official 1993 poverty level for a family of four. It's not an income likely to attract the nation's literati. Moreover, Ginn also failed to say that he had only 700 jobs to offer. His test had yielded nearly four times as many qualified applicants as he could use.

Similarly, in April 1994 a book titled Reinventing Education appeared.(3) The lead author was Louis Gerstner, Jr., CEO of IBM and former CEO of RJR Nabisco. The book charged that American high school students place last or next to last in international comparisons of math and science achievement; that SAT scores have fallen to historic lows; that we spend more money on education than any other nation; that, despite a decade of increasing expenditures, achievement test scores are static: and that the high school graduation rate is 72%. All of these statements are false, and below, under the heading "New Data," I will expose them for the hoaxes they are. Because high school completion is not discussed below, let me note that the First Bracey Report found the on-time completion rate to be 83%.

Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University had a different take on public education and its discontents.(4) Barber accepted the myth of school failure but proffered an alternative theory of how these miserable conditions came to be. It's not the kids, the teachers, or the administrators, he said.

I am increasingly persuaded that the reason for the country's inaction to rescue the schools is that Americans do not really care about education -- the country has grown comfortable with the game of "let's pretend we care." . . . The children are onto this game. They know that if we really valued schooling, we'd pay teachers what we pay stockbrokers: if we valued books, we'd spend a little something on the libraries so that adults could read, too; if we valued citizenship, we'd give national service and civic education more than pilot status: if we valued children, we wouldn't let them be abused, manipulated, impoverished, and killed in their beds by gang-war crossfire and stray bullets. Schools can and should lead, but when they confront a society that in every instance tells a story exactly opposite to the one they are supposed to be teaching, their job becomes impossible.

Barber cited the writings of E. D. Hirsch, Jr., of Chester Finn, Jr., of Diane Ravitch, and of the late Allan Bloom; then he hurled his accusation: "How this captious literature reeks of hypocrisy! How sanctimonious all the hand-wringing over still another 'education crisis' seems." Given the mass of data contained in the four Bracey Reports, I must disagree with Barber's assessment of the state of education -- but not so much with his assessment of our national values.

New Data

Of the data that have surfaced since the Third Bracey Report was published last October, the most interesting surely were those contained in Education in States and Nations, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics.(5) This report compares the 19 developed nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on a variety of participation, input, financial, and outcome variables.

One section contains results from the Second International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP-2), transformed into National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scales. While these results are interesting in themselves, the picture becomes even more intriguing when one combines these data with other NAEP reporting categories used in the 1992 NAEP mathematics assessment. By so doing, we obtain the following results:

Top Finishers

1.	Asian students (U.S.)	287
2.	Taiwan	285
3.	Korea	283
4.	Advantaged urban students (U.S.)	283
5.	White students (U.S.)	277
6.	Hungary	277

Thus the great majority of American students finish at or near the top of the most recent international comparison in mathematics, a subject in which our national performance is reputed to be dismal. Whites and Asians together make up over 70% of the K-12 population of U.S. schools.

At the 1993 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Lauren Resnick -- who in 1991 was beginning all of her speeches with the message "We all know how terrible we are" -- acknowledged, "We look pretty good in some areas."(6) Resnick had in mind reading and language arts, she said, but these new IAEP-2 data show many students looking good in mathematics, too.

Overall American rankings in IAEP-2 mathematics were low, though the scores were just below average. Many countries are tightly bunched together, and a small difference in scores makes a large difference in the rankings. But if most American students are near the top and the U.S. overall mean score is below the international average, this must mean that some groups are scoring low. And they are.
Bottom Scorers

Jordan	246
Mississippi	246
Hispanic students (U.S.)	245
Disadvantaged urban students (U.S.)	239
Black students (U.S.)	236

There is no NAEP category for "disadvantaged rural students," else there would doubtless be another entry in this list. Because ethnicity is a central fact of American life, we tend to overreport things in ethnic terms and underreport things in terms of class. But these low scores are largely a class-linked phenomenon. As Harold Hodgkinson has shown, while Asians usually score highest of all ethnic groups in mathematics, wealthy blacks outscore poor Asians.(7)

Paradoxically, another table in Education in States and Nations strongly suggests that comparing national and state school systems on the basis of average test scores is senseless. This chart shows the average scores and the range from the 5th to the 95th percentile of each country's or state's sample. As one goes from Mississippi's and Jordan's average at the bottom to Taiwan's at the top, one traverses 39 NAEP scale points. As one goes from the bottom of Taiwan's distribution (1st percentile) to the top (99th percentile), one traverses about 150 NAEP scale points.

Many states and nations show similarly large ranges. The within-country variance swamps the between-country variance. Given the enormous within-country variance, it doesn't even seem reasonable to speak of "American schools" or "Taiwanese schools" in reference to average scores. Such variability also raises an important practical question for standard-setting programs, such as the New Standards Project: Where can one place a standard that is credible as a "high" standard without failing a large proportion of students? More important than that, what happens to all the students who do fail? The answer is usually that they will be given more time to meet the standard. No one seems to have noticed that this solution may be very cruel, as well as ineffective.

While people have continued to write that test scores are falling, test scores have continued to rise. Since about 1990, scores in Iowa for all grades except 8 and 12 on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) have been at record highs.(8) As is the case with the SATI, but not with other commercial achievement tests, new forms of the ITBS and ITED are equated to previous forms. This allows us to compare trends over time in the same way that we do for SAT scores.

Actually, trend data for the ITBS and ITED in Iowa are better than trend data for the SAT because the SAT average score depends on who takes the test, and the demographics of the test-taking pool have been and are still changing. Similarly, "then and now" studies of test scores, while they generally favor "now," are hard to interpret in most places because of changing demographics. Iowa, by contrast, is in some ways frozen in time. It has no large cities with their attendant problems. And it is still nearly 98% white.

Moreover, the statewide testing program in Iowa dates from the 1930s. It is a familiar aspect of schooling, not a recently imposed high-stakes endeavor. It is thus not subject to the charge that rising scores reflect curricular alignments, inappropriate administrative procedures, cheating, or other malignancies that are alleged in some quarters to have produced testing's "Lake Wobegon Effect." In sum, whatever the ITBS score represented in 1937, it probably represents much the same thing in 1994. In recent years Iowa has ranked first or second among the states in SAT scores, ACT (American College Testing) scores, and in scores on NAEP mathematics and reading tests. Such a combination of high scores would seem to confirm that they are real.

Still, some might have reservations about the generalizability of data drawn from a single state that is not really representative of the nation as a whole. It is telling, therefore, that the national norming studies for the ITBS track the Iowa data very closely. At some grade levels, national scores are actually higher than those in Iowa. As this article went to press, 1992 norms for the ITBS were not yet available for formal publication, but the director of the Iowa program assured me that they would be slightly higher than the 1985 norms. It is thus possible that ITBS scores are at all-time highs.

Such record-setting performance is not so much at variance with other results as one might think at first. In 1993 the proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT mathematics section climbed to what appears to be an all-time high of 11%. (I say "appears" because my data go back only to 1963.) And these scores were posted before the "recentering" of SAT scores recently announced by the College Board.

This might seem like a small proportion. Indeed, a note in Education Week suggested that the editors of that publication think so.(9) But recall that the standards for the SAT were set in 1941 and were based on the performance of 10,654 students. Ninety-eight percent of them were white, 60% were male, 40% had attended private high schools, and most lived in the Northeast, where, by and large, they planned to attend private colleges and universities. The makers of the SAT imposed on the scores of this elite group a normal bell-shaped, or Gaussian, distribution. Thus we know from the statistical properties of the normal curve that only 6.68% of this elite group scored above 650. The current crop of SAT-takers is 30% minority and 52% female. Thirty-one percent of them report family incomes of under $ 30,000 annually. The test-taking pool for the SAT has been democratized, yet the proportion of high scorers is at its highest point -- 65% above the mark obtained by the standard setters.(10)

Two factors other than general performance increases might account for this improvement at the top of the distribution: 1) an increase in the number of Asian students, who outperform all other groups and/or 2) an increase in the number of students from states where small proportions of the senior class take the SAT. If the latter were true, it would be possible that those states were adding very bright students to the test-taking pool.

Neither of these hypotheses holds up under scrutiny, however. First, while Asian students average 535 on the math portion of the SAT, they constitute only 8% of all test-takers, up from 4.5% a decade ago. This means that, of the more than 110,000 students scoring above 650, only about 14,000 are Asian Americans. Their performance exceeds that of all other groups, but the improved scores must be occurring in other groups as well. In 1993 some 10,000 more seniors took the SAT than in 1992, while 5,600 more seniors scored above 650. Moreover, even the SAT verbal scores showed an increase in the number of high scorers, with some 2,600 more seniors scoring above 650 in 1993 than in 1992.

State-by-state results reveal that the recent growth in the number of SAT test-takers has been largely in states where the test was already taken by more than 50% of the senior class. In those states whose populations are growing rapidly from immigration -- e.g., Texas, Florida, and California -- the proportion of the senior class taking the SAT has been stable and relatively high at 45%, 52%, and 47% respectively.

Average scores on the SAT held little interest for the media last year. They rose for the second year in a row. The New York Times carried the story deep in the interior of Section A.(11) The Washington Post buried it in the Metro section, playing it as a story of local interest.(12) The headline mentioned results for Metro Washington districts only. Not until the seventh paragraph of the piece did the story reveal national averages and trends. Of course, downturns have consistently found their way to the front pages of both papers.

Much of the information I've reported so far suggests that levels of performance on academic indicators may reflect demographic factors more strongly than they reflect the quality of the education system. Indeed, this is precisely the conclusion that Glen Robinson and David Brandon reached when they found that they could account for 89% of the variability in state-level NAEP mathematics scores by using only four variables: number of parents in the home, level of parental education, type of community, and state poverty rates for ages 5-17.(13) A rank-order correlation coefficient of actual state ranks versus predicted ranks using these same four variables was .995. Note that none of these four variables can be controlled by the school. Robinson and Brandon strongly suggest that state NAEP scores reflect not the quality of a state's schools, but the difficulty of the educational task different states face. (These findings were reported in detail in the Research column in the September 1994 Kappan.)

Education in States and Nations also carried information on how countries spend money for education -- something that continues to be poorly reported in the U.S. As David Berliner pointed out, George Bush and virtually his whole Cabinet repeatedly pronounced some variant of "We spend more money on schools than any other country."(14) Gerstner made the same claim in the book mentioned above, as did Herbert Walberg of the University of Chicago in the Chicago SunTimes.(15)

Walberg's allegation is particularly curious because he serves as a consultant to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and it is OECD data that show that the United States is not a big spender. There are a variety of ways of calculating school spending, and they all have flaws with regard to their comparability across nations. Richard Jaeger reported several calculations indicating that the U.S. is average or below average in school spending.(16) Perhaps the fairest method is to express expenditures in terms of percentage of gross domestic product. Using this method, the U.S. ranks ninth among 19 nations in spending for K-12 education, according to Education in States and Nations.

Yet even this figure overestimates our spending on education, because a smaller slice of the pie goes to instruction in the U.S. than in many other countries. American schools provide many services that schools in other countries do not provide or provide in reduced amounts: transportation, food, medical care, counseling, and, especially, special education. In the U.S. in 1989-90, transportation alone cost more than $ 8 billion.(17) As the Sandia Report showed, costs for special education have soared for the last 20 years, while costs for regular instruction have risen virtually not at all.(18) And while costs were rising, so were special education enrollments. Between 1976 and 1990, special education enrollments increased by 39%, from 8.3% of the school population to 11.6%.(19)

Money matters loomed large in 1993. The American Legislative Exchange Council, described in the Washington Post as a conservative group of legislators, released a study conducted by former Secretary of Education William Bennett that purported to show that there is no relationship between spending and achievement.(20) This study used per-pupil expenditures as a measure of spending, while it used SAT scores for individual states as a measure of achievement. In a column headlined "Meaningless Money Factor," George Will commented that the top five SAT states -- Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Minnesota -- were all relatively low spenders, while New Jersey spent more money than any other state and finished only 39th.(21)

What neither Will nor Bennett bothered to point out, of course, is that in the high-scoring states virtually no one takes the SAT. For 1993 the percentages of high school seniors taking the SAT in the top five states were 5%, 6%, 6%, 4%, and 10% respectively. Most seniors in those states take the ACT. In New Jersey, on the other hand, fully 76% of the senior class filled in the bubbles on SAT answer sheets. A state that includes three-fourths of its student body in a tested population will not look good in comparison with a state whose tested population is made up of an academic elite seeking admission to selective colleges.

The notion that money makes a difference in education outcomes has been gaining ascendancy in recent years, and new data arrived in 1994. For a number of years, school critics have claimed that education's problems cannot be solved by "throwing money at the schools." The usual source cited by these skeptics is a review of the research conducted by Eric Hanushek.(22) Although Keith Baker demonstrated in the pages of the April 1991 Kappan that Hanushek's data did not substantiate Hanushek's claims, Baker's analysis of the data had little impact on those who believed Hanushek to be correct.

A recent reanalysis of Hanushek's set of studies, however, might lead us to place more emphasis than ever before on money as an important factor in achievement. (Recall that, in the Third Bracey Report, I suggested that, if money makes no difference, someone should inform the wealthy districts so that they'll stop spending so much more of it than other folks.) Indeed, in the new analysis, money seems to be most important when used directly in the service of instruction.(23)

For his part, Hanushek now claims that he never said money makes no difference. He asserts that the reason he found no strong or systematic relationship is that some school districts find effective ways of spending money, while others do not. What we need to know is what kinds of expenditures are effective and how they exert their effect. "The available evidence," Hanushek contends, "simply indicates that the natural proclivities of school systems do not systematically lead to effective use of resources." He does not define further these "natural proclivities" of school systems, but he gives as an example the proposal that we increase the salaries of teachers by 10%. This, says Hanushek, wouldn't increase the relationship between salary and student performance. Rather it might "slow down turnover of teachers, so that policies designed to attract better people into teaching would be thwarted."(24)

In connection with teacher salaries, it is worth noting that the starting, mid-level, and maximum salaries of teachers do not compare well with the salaries of other white-collar professionals. Nor do they compare well against salaries for teachers in many other developed nations. The U.S. was seventh in a comparison of teacher pay in 13 developed nations.(25)

Money for education is important in ways many people don't usually think about. A headline in the Washington Post told the story: "Across U.S., Schools Are Falling Apart."(26) In Education Week a headline ran simply: "Schoolhouse Rot."(27) Actually, though these reports were highly relevant, they weren't news. A 1990 report from the Education Writers Association told the same story, as did a 1991 survey by the American Association of School Administrators.

In September of 1993, the Educational Testing Service released Adult Literacy in America, a study it conducted for the U.S. Department of Education.(28) With rare exceptions, the report was seen as further proof of education's low state. "Dumber Than We Thought" screeched the headline of a Newsweek story on the report.(29) One had to read much of the story to learn that the headline was not Newsweek's studied assessment, but a direct quote from former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Indeed, this study defined literacy in quite a complicated way, and, as Pauline Gough observed in an editorial in the Kappan, among those who scored low were significant numbers of the old, the foreign born, the visually impaired, or individuals who had "physical, mental, or health conditions that kept them from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities."(30)

Before leaving the topic of literacy, recall that the Third Bracey Report discussed an International Association for the Assessment of Educational Achievement study of reading in which American 9-year-olds finished second in the world among students from 31 nations, while U.S. 14-year-olds finished eighth and with scores as close to first place as those of the 9-year-olds. Such data are hard to square with the alarmist reactions to the adult literacy survey, unless we assume that the entire world faces a literacy crisis.

Judging from my mailbox, the U.S. Department of Education has increased the rate at which it reports statistics. I understand from officials at ED that they are striving to improve the quality as well. When ED strayed from the mere facts last year, the outcomes were less than successful. Two interpretive reports, National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent(31) and Prisoners of Time,(32) left much to be desired. The former contained no new data and numerous factual errors; the latter was thin and repeated oft-made, mostly commonsensical recommendations. Given that Prisoners of Time was two years in production, one wonders how the researchers spent their time.

The George Will Affair

Nothing better captured the political Right's antipathy toward public education than its campaign for Proposition 174, a referendum in the 1993 California election that would have established a $ 2,600 credit for parents to use at the school of their choice. The referendum apparently (the wording was so vague that even the measure's authors couldn't answer questions about its impact) would have permitted anyone who could round up 25 children to open a school. Reports cited a coven of witches that planned to do so, since their beliefs were not included in the state's Curriculum Frameworks. Even California's Gov. Pete Wilson, generally a supporter of vouchers, came out against Proposition 174 because it would have devastating effects on the already devastated California economy. Wilson reportedly would have backed the measure if its creators had phased in the fiscal jolts over five years. But they refused, and Wilson felt obliged to oppose it.

Not so William Bennett, who stumped for it, and George Will, who dedicated several columns to it. In his column of 26 August 1992, Will wrote, "Nationally about half of urban public school teachers with school-age children send their children to private schools."(33) Three days later, Will pitched this statistic at Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association (NEA), on "This Week with David Brinkley." Unfortunately, Geiger swung wildly and said, erroneously, "It's about 40%." Will shrugged, as if to say, "Thanks for proving my point." And a new urban legend was born.

Will's numbers looked spurious to me -- almost as spurious as those two lists on the bulletin board in Cherry Creek. Will's office said that the figures came from "School Choice Cases," by Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice. Bolick, in turn, sent me to David Boaz of the Cato Institute and to his Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City. Boaz passed me on to Denis Doyle of the Hudson Institute. In 1986 Doyle and Terry Hartle, both then working for the American Enterprise Institute, had actually written a never-published paper on the topic.(34) Doyle's and Hartle's figures, which they considered to be "preliminary," in no way approached 50%. The usually cited figure of 46% (which Will interpreted as "about half") applied only to teachers in Chicago, and 80% of those teachers sent their children to parochial schools. The numbers Doyle and Hartle actually used in their paper would yield an estimated figure more like 21% for urban public school teachers and 16% for all teachers -- not much above the national average for all parents.

Readers can find a complete analysis of this affair in the September 29 issue of Education Week.(35) Here I wish only to note further that it is inappropriate to compare teachers with the general public. All teachers have a college education, and, because so many teachers are not the sole wage earners in their families, the average annual family income for teachers is more than $ 70,000. Moreover, a 1992 study by James Coleman put the average income of families with children in private schools at $ 70,000.(36) The proper comparison would match teachers with another group of similar socioeconomic status. When the American Federation of Teachers conducted such an analysis, it found a greater proportion of teachers using public schools than was true of comparable families with similar incomes.(37)

Various versions of my analysis were sent to various media outlets. One found its way to the Washington Post, where Will's columns originate. It was turned down by a form letter. Another went to the Wall Street Journal. Daniel Henninger, the editorial page editor, sent a letter neither accepting nor rejecting the piece, but thanking me for "the Third Bracey Report and the debunking of George Will's statistic." Imagine my surprise, then, at the long lead editorial that appeared in the Journal of October 25 in support of Proposition 174, headed by a segment of the transcript of the Will/Geiger exchange from "This Week with David Brinkley."(38) The editorial gave no indication that either figure was in error and went on to castigate public educators for opposing Proposition 174.

My investigations failed to impress Will himself. A letter from him read, in its entirety, "Your problems multiply. Mr. Geiger, head of the teachers union, concedes 'about 40%,' which strongly suggests that my apogee may be bang on." Enclosed with the letter was the transcript from the relevant part of the Brinkley show.

Responding to my article in a letter to Education Week, Doyle also accepted Geiger's figure. Surely Will's and Doyle's letters marked two historic moments. Both usually hold the NEA in the same high esteem as Jim Brady holds the National Rifle Association. Yet here they were, apparently accepting on faith with no questions asked a statistic mumbled by the president of the NEA off the top of his head. It was as if the head of the Tobacco Institute had said that nicotine was not addictive, and Garry Trudeau had agreed.

Yet another copy of my analysis went to News & Views of the Educational Excellence Network, a monthly compilation of articles and essays that had been initiated by Chester Finn, Jr., when he was at Vanderbilt University and that is now published by the Hudson Institute. I knew that the piece would not be published in the newsletter. My modest goal was only to preempt the reproduction of Will's essay. In a letter, Michael Heise, then director of News & Views, wrote, "I want to thank you for forwarding me a copy of the papers entitled 'George Will's Urban Legend' and 'The Third Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education.' We will give them careful consideration for the next issue of News & Views." The next issue contained only Will's article.

I tried to enlist the aid of media watchers in debunking this statistic. The Washington Post ombudsman, Joann Byrd, had been unresponsive to earlier entreaties, so I approached the Post's designated media watcher, Howard Kurtz. He wrote a short and accurate summary of the episode.(39) No one could account for the transformation of a statistic for Chicago into one for the nation. Kurtz quoted the Cato Institute's Boaz as saying, "All I did was repeat the findings of Doyle and Hartle." Kurtz concluded with a quote from Henninger of the Wall Street Journal: "The precise figures are less important than 'that public school teachers send their children to private school at a rate higher than the general population.'" This certainly was in line with the earlier editorial. In the body of that editorial, the editors had cited the figures for California public school teachers as 18%. But rather than draw attention to the distance between 18% and 50%, the Wall Street Journal commented only that this rate was higher than for the general public.

As I noted above, the comparison between teachers and the general public is not even the proper comparison, and the proper comparison finds the allegation false. As Shanker had said, "When teachers are compared with other college graduates, it becomes clear that they send their kids to private schools less often than other people of comparable socio-economic status."(40)

How the figure of "nearly half" got generalized from Chicago to the nation remains a mystery. Six months earlier, Will had cited it correctly. He closed his 7 March 1993 column in support of vouchers for Chicago with "About half the Chicago public school teachers with school-age children send them to private schools."(41) Queries to Will's office to explain how half of Chicago teachers in March became half of the nation's urban teachers in August went unanswered.

Education and the Economy

The First Bracey Report raised questions about the link between schools and the performance of the economy. The Second Bracey Report expressed those doubts more vehemently and presented some evidence that schools were not responsible for the economic malaise. By the Third Bracey Report, this evidence had grown to mountain size. Conditions now allow us to lay to rest, once and for all, the misbegotten notion that schools are dragging our economy down -- or, for that matter, pushing it up.

It's not that people aren't still trying to make that connection. In May of this year, IBM's Gerstner took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to declare that "Our Schools Are Failing" and to talk about the threat posed by that dismal prospect.(42) The usually reasonable and moderate David Broder declared in the Washington Post, "Once again, Americans are being asked to take a gut-check on how serious we are about our children's future. If we're serious, almost everyone agrees, we have to lift the performance of the youngsters coming out of high school, so they have the skills required in the new economy."(43)

In other words, the schools haven't gotten any better, and we are still "a nation at risk." As A Nation at Risk had said in 1983, "If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system." It would seem that the economy depends on it.

Fortunately, the economy wasn't listening. It roared off to heights that -- if Gerstner and Broder and A Nation at Risk were right -- ought to be impossible. A lead article by Sylvia Nasar in the business section of the New York Times trumpeted this success in the headline "The American Economy, Back on Top." The Times waxed ecstatic:

A three percent economic growth rate, a gain of two million jobs in the past year, and an inflation rate reminiscent of the 1960s make America the envy of the industrialized world. The amount the average American worker can produce, already the highest in the world, is growing faster than in other wealthy countries, including Japan. The United States has become the world's low-cost provider of many sophisticated products and services, from plastics to software to financial services.

For the most part, these advantages will continue even after countries like Japan and Germany snap out of their recessions. It is the United States, not Japan, that is the master of the next generation of commercially important computer and communications technologies and also of leading-edge services from medicine to movie making.(44)

The Times article gushed on in this fashion for 2,500 euphoric words. And it was scarcely a lone voice. T. R. Reid, Washington Post foreign correspondent, filed a report from Tokyo, noting that Japanese business was learning from America once again.(45) The Post article followed an earlier New York Times article headlined "Now It's Japan's Turn to Play Catch-Up."(46) That article carried the subhead "From PC's to Cable TV, Tokyo Finds Itself Far Behind in the Next Electronics Revolution." And U.S. News & World Report carried a long feature article titled "America Cranks It Up."(47) Even Fortune was forced to concede, "For all the criticism of U.S. education, youngsters enter the work force far better equipped than today's mature workers."(48)

That last comment was as close as the schools came to getting any credit for the recovery. None of the other articles cited, nor myriad similar pieces published elsewhere, even mentioned the schools.

Only a couple of years ago, Marc Tucker, Lester Thurow, and Robert Reich, to name but a few, were decrying the state of our schools and our Taylorized production lines. "Japan makes television sets; we watch them," declared the Hudson Institute's Denis Doyle in 1992.(49) We might ask ourselves the question, If the schools are still awful, how on earth did the economy manage such a miraculous turnaround? According to all the articles, the new successes derived from "reengineering" -- industry's equivalent of education's "restructuring" -- and the application of new technologies. Companies downsized to become lean and mean. Management savvy saved the day. The schools were, at best, invisible in the process. In fact, John McClain of the Associated Press reported a survey confirming that the economy is booming but also pointing out that pervasive weaknesses in elementary and secondary education still threatened its health.(50)

Stanford University's Larry Cuban was among those to notice the asymmetry between blame for the bad economic times and credit for the good ones. "Why is it that now with a bustling economy, rising productivity, and shrinking unemployment American public schools are not receiving credit for the turnaround?" Cuban wondered.(51) Citing some of the evidence disclosed earlier in this report, he continued his questioning: "Now that America outstrips Japan and Germany in labor productivity, economic growth, and share of world merchandising exports, why haven't public schools received the equivalent of the Oscars?"

Cuban knew that his questions were rhetorical. "Not even a cheaply framed certificate of merit is in the offing for public schools. For the myth of better schools as the engine for a leaner, stronger economy was a scam from the very beginning," he concluded. Just so. In the First Bracey Report, I called A Nation at Risk a "xenophobic screed." These days, I simply call it a lie: much of the evidence backing its claims is highly selective; some of it doesn't even exist.

This particular economic boom comes with a most unusual downside. While Nasar's New York Times piece, cited earlier, spoke of the creation of two million jobs, it didn't say how many of them are good jobs. The reality is that damn few are good. In recent years, people have been indoctrinated with the argument that the fastest growing fields all require highly skilled people. This is true. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these fields account for very few jobs overall: 3,162,000 by the year 2005. On the other hand, the single largest occupation, retail sales, by itself accounts for 4,500,000. The 10 occupations with the highest numbers of workers are largely unskilled, and these account for 30,100,000 jobs -almost 10 times more than the fastest growing fields.(52) As manufacturing lost 255,000 jobs in 1992, the restaurant industry alone added 249,000 jobs. Not many called for executive chefs.(53)

Who is taking all these new jobs? In addition to the usual new graduates and immigrants, the answer is people who already have jobs. The Labor Department reported that seven million people hold 15 million jobs, and for the first time it documented the existence of a phenomenon heretofore known mostly through anecdote: the three- and four-job couples. Some of these multi-job workers, it is true, are people trying to break into new fields, but the largest group consists of those just trying to pay their bills.(54)

Ironically, the creation of some jobs dooms others. Patte Barth, the editor of Basic Education, once declared in the pages of that journal that advanced algebra would soon be a basic skill, and by way of example she wrote of a restaurant that was run by only two people.(55) Barth concentrated on the breadth and depth of the skills those people would have to have and on what that implied for education. I am more impressed by the fact that there are only two of them on the premises.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out that, "between 1979 and 1992, the Fortune 500 companies presented 4.4 million of their employees with pink slips."(56) Barnet saw two forces operating to kill jobs. One was moving the job to another locale -- maybe within the U.S., maybe not. "More and more of us, from wastebasket emptiers to CEOs of multinational corporations, are waking up to the fact that we are swimming in a global labor pool," he wrote.

The movement has particularly pernicious effects in the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America -- because in those areas large numbers of women are entering the work force, and those nations have traditionally paid women much less than men.

The other force is technology. In the past year, article after article announced layoffs of a few hundred to many thousand workers, even as other articles (sometimes the very same ones) displayed curves of rising productivity. The relationship is causal: as people become more productive, fewer of them are needed in the work force. Barnet had this to say: "I have visited a variety of highly automated factories in the United States and Europe, including automobile, electronics, and printing plants. The scarcity of human beings in these places is spooky."

In 1979 Christopher Evans predicted that the microchip would end work as we know it.(57) Evans foresaw pervasive affluence and the possibility of a 25-hour work week. To date, the scenario has been more like that described 15 years earlier by Kurt Vonnegut in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, wherein one character mused, "The problem is, how to love people who have no use." As Barnet observed, "In the end, the job crisis raises the most fundamental question of human existence: What are we doing here?"

Given all of this, it is not surprising that Frank Swoboda, Washington Post business writer, found workers asking "one of the most fundamental questions facing the nation today: Can a worker acquire enough skills to achieve job security in a world of global competition?" Swoboda found the short-term answer to be "no." He didn't have a long-term answer.(58)

While education is at best tenuously linked to the well-being of the nation, it is becoming even more important to the well-being of the individual. That is, education is related to the likelihood of getting a job in the first place or of finding another job when you lose the one you had. Still, as Swoboda reported, it is not a guarantee. It is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for well-paying employment. The number of college-educated door-to-door salesmen grew from 57,000 in 1983 to 75,000 in 1990, while the number of bus drivers with bachelor's degrees increased from 99,000 to 166,000. Ross Perot wondered why all the hotel people who carried his luggage had bachelor's degrees, giving rise to the phrase "B.A. Bellhops," while in a Washington Post piece titled "Take This Job and Love It," a recent college graduate was quoted as saying, "We're getting jobs chimps could do."(59)

That last article described college graduates working as file clerks and photocopy makers. Compared to high school graduates, though, they had it good. "For hundreds of thousands of people graduating from high school this spring, the diploma is a one-way ticket to low-paying, part-time jobs at best," wrote Peter Kilborn.(60) The lucky ones might get full-time jobs doing what they did as part-time employees after school and on weekends.

Some companies, including large ones such as Federal Express, are taking advantage of the situation by offering only part-time work that comes without benefits. "There is a myth in this country that, if you want to be something, you can be it," said economist Richard Rothstein. "This generation is finding out it isn't true with a vengeance. And we wonder why they're cynical."(61)

In fact, high school graduates now face a new source of competition for jobs: college graduates. "Industry is shedding layers of middle-management jobs held by college graduates," wrote Kilborn, "creating an additional challenge for high school graduates: People with college degrees have invaded their blue-collar turf." Of 1993 high school graduates who tried to enter the labor market, 24% were still unemployed as of October, almost four times the national average for all workers.(62)

For those who do find jobs, whether they be college or high school graduates, wages are down. Entry-level wages fell in real dollars from just above $ 12 an hour for college graduates in 1973 to $ 11 an hour in 1991. For those with only a high school diploma, the drop was from just above $ 8 an hour to just above $ 6 an hour.(63) Alan Wurtzel, chairman of the board at Circuit City, an electronics discount chain on the East Coast, wrote that "Circuit City is a large national company that seldom hires people right out of high school.... In hiring new employees for our stores, warehouses, and offices, Circuit City is looking for people who are able to provide very high levels of customer service, who are honest, and who have a positive, enthusiastic, achievement-oriented work ethic."(64) These are characteristics that our high school graduates lack, Wurtzel claimed. He somehow failed to mention that Circuit City warehouse employees start at $ 4.25 an hour, while salespeople are paid no salary at all and work strictly on commission.

Still, education pays. The U.S. Census Bureau reported the following lifetime earnings for various levels of education:(65)

Not a high school graduate	$ 609,000
High school diploma	$ 821,000
Some college	$ 993,000
Associate's degree	$ 1,062,000
Bachelor's degree	$ 1,421,000
Master's degree	$ 1,619,000
Doctorate	$ 2,142,000
Professional (doctor, lawyer)	$ 3,013,000

Despite the turnaround in the U.S. economy since 1992, the Census Bureau also reported that the number of poor Americans continued to grow, reaching 14.7%. For children, the figure was 20%, and for African Americans and Hispanics it reached nearly 50%. These statistics seem to verify the charge that economic success in America continues to be polarized along class lines. They are all the more horrific when one considers that the threshold of poverty for a family of four is a scandalously low $ 14,335, according to the Census Bureau -- a figure less than half of $ 30,786, the median American household income for a family of four. As discussed in the Third Bracey Report, children of poverty do not perform well in school.

Indeed, other studies of poverty in America suggest that we are moving away from rather than toward our first national goal: that all children begin school ready to learn. The proportion of low-income children in preschool programs is far smaller than that for upper-income children. And day-care programs that serve low-income families are more likely to be custodial than are programs serving upper-income families, which are likely to be developmental.

School Choice

School choice as a one-stop solution to education's problems might have crested with California's Proposition 174, a 1993 referendum that would have created a voucher system with public funds available for use in private schools. Interest now seems to be on the wane, perhaps because interest in charter schools is waxing. While John Chubb continued to tout free-market choice,(66) while Terry Moe showed up at California's "Education Summit" in February to promise another choice referendum, and while Gerstner and his co-authors plumped for choice in their book, most other writers urged caution. So did the data.

Harold Howe II exposed choice as no more than the latest episode of what he termed "millennialist thinking" -- thinking that embodies the hope that a single social reform might bring the millennium.(67) Certainly, in their book Chubb and Moe sang a most ardent paean to the free market as a panacea for most anything, especially the ills of schools:

The eighth wonder of the world is the capitalist system of economic organization. It has brought more good to more people than any other large-scale social invention. Therefore its basic assumptions are to be treasured and transferred to all possible realms of human activity.... The wonderful power of competition to produce quality will solve all the messy little problems like how to pay for schools, find and prepare good teachers, and motivate children to learn.(68)

This passage leaves Howe all but mute. He can declare only, "If this isn't millennial thinking, I can't imagine what is." Such gushiness coming from supposedly serious scholars certainly is bewildering.

In two similar books, sociologist Peter Cookson, Jr., of Adelphi University and political scientist Jeffrey Henig of George Washington University independently demolished the central premises of market-driven school choice. Both reviewed the history of choice as an idea and the data from choice experiments. The claims for choice are strong; the evidence, weak. Henig found most success stories to be casual claims without real substance, studies with inadequate measures to demonstrate the claims, or studies so lacking in controls as to render them impossible to interpret.(69) Both Henig and Cookson are particularly dismissive of Chubb and Moe's analysis, which turned tiny test score gains into a scale they claimed showed years of growth. Chubb and Moe, says Cookson, "have so magnified their results by altering the unit of analysis ... that they have lost sight of their own finding, which indicates that there are very few achievement gains between the sophomore and senior years of high school."(70)

In fact, Henig stands the market metaphor on its head. Examining the evidence, he concludes that, when choice works, it works not because it unshackles pent-up market demands, which often can't even be found. It works because of the much-maligned bureaucrats and government agencies:

The expanded use of choice ... is better understood as having arisen from collective negotiation, public leadership, and authoritative government, rather than from an unleashing of individual interests and market forces.... Whether reactive or activist, in all cases the process of experimentation with choice has been public and political -- mediated through collective institutions and made to work through the application of authoritative government action.(71)

Both Henig and Cookson warn that market-based choice systems would hide this collective and public discussion and would deprive schools of one of their most important qualities, their openness to public scrutiny and debate.

Henig and Cookson both favor choice, but they see it as one tool among many to improve education, not as a solution to education's problems. Henig conjectures that there might even be choice situations in which public funds would be appropriately spent in private schools.

Joe Nathan, a leading advocate of public school choice, also urged moderation. "Those who promote school choice as a 'panacea' are ignorant and/or foolish," Nathan charged. "Chubb and Moe have done more to harm the choice movement than anyone else."(72) Nathan reasons that we need school choice because there is no one best system for all children; because choice is central to teacher empowerment; because without government-sponsored choice, only the affluent can have it; and because competition stimulates improvement.

For these and other reasons, choice advocates have closely watched Milwaukee's experiment with choice, which provides public money for tuition at private schools. The data from the third year of this program are decidedly mixed. The program has never recruited as many students as it has places for, and the attrition rate is high. It might be no higher than that for low-income children elsewhere in Milwaukee, but -- if people are picking schools they want -- we ought to expect those schools to have stronger holding power.

Test results are mixed, too.(73) Scores have bounced around and shown no sizable increases, even when the results are statistically significant. (That tests of statistical significance are inappropriate for such program evaluations was a topic treated in the Kappan Research column in September 1992.)

The parents in the Milwaukee choice program are better educated, make more money, and are more involved with schools than those who are not. They were angry at their neighborhood schools and had better attitudes about the choice programs. But this finding, too, is an equivocal outcome, as the authors of the report point out: "While they look like just the kinds of parents that choice programs were designed to serve, they might have provided an even greater social good by staying behind to work to improve the neighborhood school."(74)

Poverty

Under the heading "New Data," above, we have already seen that poverty depresses school performance. Poverty wreaks its havoc not only through home and community conditions that are antithetical to academic success, but through the underfunding of the schools themselves. Most schools are still funded largely through property taxes, thus ensuring the existence of inequities. Indeed, reports from the South, especially Mississippi, reveal the growth of "rural ghettos," communities of largely black people with little or no industrial base that are ignored by the larger white culture.(75)

There is growing interest in removing these savage inequalities. While the supreme court in Minnesota decided that state's constitution did not require it to provide equal funds to all districts, more and more state supreme courts have found that inequitable school financing is a violation of state constitutions. One of the most recent is New Jersey, where in ordering changes the court was clearly concerned with equity in outcomes, not merely inputs. New Jersey had already made considerable progress since a similar decision in 1990. While the wealthiest districts in many states spend two or three times as much money as the poorest districts, the poorest districts in New Jersey currently receive 84% of the funding that wealthy districts receive.

Still, in interpreting New Jersey's constitutional provision for a "thorough and efficient" education, the state supreme court strongly implied that, since poor children are disadvantaged in all other aspects of their lives, the schools must attempt to compensate for such disadvantage: "Success cannot be expected to be realized unless the department and the commission identify and implement the special supplemental programs and services that the children in these poor districts require." Some programs and services in poor districts will be "unique to those students, not required in wealthier districts."(76)

Although the arguments are typically cast in economic, not educational terms, the focus on poverty and welfare reform also drew attention to illegitimacy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed that out-of-wedlock births held at a flat 4% from 1940 to 1956, then began an accelerating upturn. Currently, 30% of all births are out-of-wedlock births, as are 80% of those to teenage mothers.(77)

Charles Murray observed that women with family incomes of more than $ 75,000 account for just 1% of illegitimate babies, while women with family incomes under $ 20,000 account for 69%.(78) The annual cost to taxpayers of illegitimate births to the poor is estimated at $ 34 billion. According to Murray, "Throughout human history, a single woman with a small child has not been a viable economic unit." Murray claims that we have been able to tolerate the demise of the black family, as horrible as that has been, because it involves only a small minority of the population. Significantly, he titles his essay "The Coming White Underclass."

Murray has performed a public service by recommending a policy of eliminating all economic support for single mothers. Few agree with this move, including me, but by framing the issue in this stark, draconian light, Murray has forced others to consider more moderate welfare reforms.

The Media

This report has already cited numerous examples of the media's misreading or misreporting the situation in education. For the most part, media attacks on schools continued as in previous years. However, there did seem to be an increase in what I have termed "gratuitous media violence" visited on the schools this year. Gratuitous violence occurs when schools are criticized in an article whose subject is something other than education.

A few examples should suffice. Conde Nast Traveler carries periodic contests called "Where Are You?" It provides clues, and the reader must determine his or her precise location. In the June 1994 edition, one of the clues begins, "In a nation of rampant illiteracy (no, it's not the United States)...." By the same token, the June 9 edition of the cartoon strip "Kudzu" contains a discussion of Generation X in which one character thinks that young adults are called that because they can't write their names. In an article about border collies, Charles Krauthammer declared that "we have gotten used to falling SAT scores, coming in dead last in international math comparisons, and high schoolers who cannot locate the Civil War to the nearest half-century."(79) And so on. For the record, in none of the nine comparisons contained in the Second International Mathematics Study and in the Second International Assessment of Educational Progress does America finish "dead last." U.S. scores are, in fact, close to the international averages.

The media's indifference to good news about schools earned it a collective jibe from Project Censored, which annually names the top 10 censored stories of the year. In 1993 it gave the number-three ranking to the Sandia Report and applauded the Kappan for publishing an article summarizing the report. Wrote the people at Project Censored, "This report was suppressed by the Bush administration and virtually ignored by the mainstream media because it challenged the widespread view that public schools are self-destructing."(80)

The Utne Reader, a bimonthly collection of articles that bills itself as "the best of the alternative press," reprinted Project Censored's report,(81) but it must be said that editor Eric Utne's hands are not entirely clean in this matter either. I had sent a copy of the Sandia Report to the Utne Reader, and each year I also dispatched a copy of the Bracey Report. A cover letter urged the publication to give as much attention to these kinds of reports as it had to critical articles. But no response ever came from the Utne Reader.

In the Third Bracey Report, I noted that people tend to like their local schools and quoted Denis Doyle as saying, "That is scientific evidence that ignorance is bliss." It now looks as if another aphorism more accurately describes the situation: "Seeing is believing." Polling data from the American Association of School Administrators indicate that people get most of their information about the nation's schools from television, followed by newspapers.(82) Given the uniformly negative coverage provided by both media, a less than grim view would be hard to come by.

Television and newspapers play a major role in providing information about local schools, too, but so do friends, neighbors, children, local school officials, local school newsletters, and school visits. A lesson for schoolpeople might be to include information about the national education scene as well as local information in the materials that go home to parents.

Of course, education is not the only subject that is misreported. (Indeed, that's something I worry about when citing journalists on, say, the economy.) Richard Harwood, former Washington Post ombudsman who is now retired, writes often about the general decline in journalism. He cites David Broder's comment that "citizens now perceive the press as part of the insider's world.... We have, through the elevation of salaries, prestige, education, and so on among reporters, distanced ourselves to a remarkable degree from the people we are writing for and have become much, much closer to the people experts and politicians we are writing about."(83)

In a similar vein Harwood quotes another journalist, Tom Koch, who commented, "For twenty years content analysis studies have shown that between 70 and 90 percent of our content is at heart the voice of officials and their experts, translated by reporters into supposedly 'objective' news. People don't trust us anymore ... because the way we quote and attribute and build factoids as if they were truth is a lie. And folks are catching on."(84) I had an inkling of this in a conversation with Broder shortly after he wrote a favorable column about Prisoners of Time. Although the Bracey Reports contain much more data than that slim volume -- some 200 references in the first three Bracey Reports -- Broder told me that he would require "more than a single voice" to be convinced of my position. Does an official government report, one commissioned by a former secretary of education who wishes to privatize public schools, constitute a chorus?

On the rare occasion when a major publication did include something good about U.S. schools, no one else seemed to notice. In December 1993, William Celis III wrote a front-page story in the New York Times titled "International Report Card Shows U.S. Schools Work."(85) Many statistics from the OECD study that Cells included in his story have either appeared in the Third Bracey Report or show up in this one. He found American students only slightly below international averages in math and science and almost at the top in reading. He found that more Americans get a college education than is true of citizens in any other nation. He found that a great deal of money from American school budgets goes for noninstructional programs (e.g., transportation, food), which is not the case in other nations. And no other major media outlet carried Celis' story.

One story of American educational success did appear in the Washington Post, but it was played only for its local angle. The American team finished first in the 1994 International Mathematics Olympiad, and one team member was from Bethesda, Maryland, just over the Maryland state line from the District of Columbia. The story was filed by the Post's Montgomery County, Maryland, desk and discussed the Bethesda student's achievements in more detail than those of the team.(86)

That the U.S. did well was not exactly news. Our worst finish in the Olympiad was sixth place in 1993. To finish first, the U.S. team had to outscore teams from 68 other nations. But in addition to taking first, the U.S. team truly aced the test: all six team members posted perfect scores, a first-ever occurrence for any team and something that astonished program organizers.

That small triumph aside, it is likely that only in America could a movie about a simple man who accidentally participates in events that shape the nation and achieves fortune and happiness set off a national debate about education. Many moviegoers saw Forrest Gump as delightful entertainment with, perhaps, another Academy Award in the offing for Tom Hanks. Many others saw it as avowing that it's good to be dumb. These people also saw its popularity as proof that Americans celebrate stupidity and passivity, that we derogate brains and hard work.(87) It's certainly true that a brainy person risks being called geek, dork, and nerd, and the celebration of our Olympiad math champions was brief. Still, the proportion of high scorers on the math section of the SAT continues to grow, more kids show up each year for and show well on the Advanced Placement tests, and as a nation we come close to the gold medal in reading. Somebody, somehow, must have been encouraging these kids.

1. Barry O'Neill, "Anatomy of a Hoax," New York Times Magazine, 6 March 1994, pp. 46-49.

2. Richard Rothstein, "The Myth of Public School Failure," The American Prospect, Spring 1993, pp. 20-34.

3. Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., et al., Reinventing Education (New York: Dutton Books, 1994).

4. Benjamin R. Barber, "America Skips School," Harper's Magazine, November 1993, pp. 39-46.

5. Education in States and Nations (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Report No. 93-237, 1993).

6. Lauren Resnick, "New Standards: What to Measure," symposium at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 1994.

7. Harold Hodgkinson, "A Demographic Look at Tomorrow," Institute for Educational Leadership, Washington, D.C., 1992.

8. H. D. Hoover, director of the Iowa Testing Program, personal communication, July 1994.

9. Ronald A. Wolk, "Editor's Note," Education Week, 10 March 1993, p. 29.

10. These and other SAT-related data are from the College Board's annual publication, Profiles of College-Bound Seniors.

11. Karen De Witt, "Scores Improve for 2d Consecutive Year," New York Times, 19 August 1993, p. A-19.

12. Lisa Leff, "SAT Scores Rise in Fairfax, D.C., Drop in Alexandria, Pr. George's," Washington Post, 19 August 1993.

13. Glen E. Robinson and David P. Brandon, NAEP Test Scores: Should They Be Used to Compare and Rank State Educational Quality? (Arlington, Va.: Educational Research Service, 1994).

14. David C. Berliner, "The Author Responds," Backtalk letter, Phi Delta Kappan, October 1993, p. 193.

15. Herbert C. Walberg, "Are Proposed Educational Reforms Effective?," Chicago Sun-Times, 5 February 1994, p. 16.

16. Richard M. Jaeger, "World Class Standards, Choice, and Privatization: Weak Measurement Serving Presumptive Policy," Phi Delta Kappan, October 1992, pp. 118-28.

17. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 1993 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1993), Table 161, p. 159.

18. C. C. Carson, R. M. Huelskamp, and T. D. Woodall, "Perspectives on Education in America," Journal of Educational Research, May/June 1993, pp. 260-310.

19. Digest of Education Statistics 1993, Table 51, p. 65.

20. American Legislative Exchange Council, "Report Card on American Education 1993," Washington, D.C., 1993.

21. George F. Will, "Meaningless Money Factor," Washington Post, 26 August 1993, p. C-7.

22. Eric A. Hanushek, "The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance." Educational Researcher, May 1989, pp. 45-65.

23. Larry V. Hedges, Richard D. Laine, and Rob Greenwald, "Does Money Matter? A Meta-Analysis of Studies of the Effects of Differential Inputs on Student Outcomes," Educational Researcher, April 1994, pp. 5-14.

24. Eric A. Hanushek, "Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Reply to Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald," Educational Researcher, May 1994, pp. 5-8.

25. William Celis III, "Teachers in U.S. Trail Those Elsewhere in Pay," New York Times, 18 August 1993, p. A-17.

26. Mary Jordan and Tracy Thompson, "Across U.S., Schools Are Falling Apart," Washington Post, 22 November 1993, p. A-1.

27. Drew Lindsay, "Schoolhouse Rot," Education Week, 13 July 1994, pp. 27-33.

28. Adult Literacy in America (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 1993).