PUBLIC EDUCATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
by Gerald W. Bracey for America Tomorrow

At one point in The Thirteenth Man, former secretary of education, Terrel Bell reflects on his perception of educational decline. "If we are frank with ourselves," wrote Bell, "we must acknowledge that for most Americans...neither diligence in learning nor rigorous standards of performance prevail...How do we once again become a nation of learners, in which attitudes towards intellectual pursuit and quality of work have excellence at their core?"

In penning these words, Bell displayed two common qualities of educational reformers since World War II: nostalgia and amnesia. They look back through a haze to some imagined Golden Era of American education when we were, in Bell's words "a nation of learners." The nostalgics forget that the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty does not read "Send me your college grads, your 1200 SAT's yearning to learn." They forget that a century ago, the high school graduation rate was about three percent. They forget that that graduation rate did not exceed 50% until after World War II (the current on-time graduation rate is 83%. If one adds in those who receive a GED or who drop out but then return for a diploma, the rate rises to 91%). They forget that until recently it was assumed that no more than 20% of American youth could handle a college curriculum (currently, 62% of all high school graduates are enrolled in college the following fall).

Education reformers are scarcely alone in their pining for the "good old days." Indeed, Newsweek essayist, Robert Samuelson, felt obligated to devote an entire book to the anti-nostalgia thesis that these are the good old days. At the end of World War II, writes Samuelson, the nation looked to the future with great hope:

Given such unrealistic expectations, Samuelson contends, disappointment was inevitable. And while Americans express frustration, on virtually every measure of health, wealth and well-being except crime, they were better of in 1970 than in 1945, better off in 1990 than 1970. And even crime, which increased rapidly from 1960, leveled off in 1975. People live almost twice as long as in 1890; accidental deaths are less than half of what they were in 1945. Even air pollution is much lower now than it was in 1940. And so forth.

Attitudes towards education have certainly been affected by the general tendency to be unrealistic about what is possible. Indeed, if we judge by Samuelson's other writing, expectations might have been higher for education than for other institutions. In a Newsweek essay, Samuelson did not chart the kind of progress for schools as for other areas, but allowed only that the "The alarmism about the 'education crisis' may have been overblown."

Not only have expectations for schools been high, since 1945 they included expectations that schools should solve social problems. In the 1950's they were assailed for failing to do enough in the space and weapons races. In the 1960's they were maligned for not integrating society fast enough. In the 1980's they were accused of letting the country down in its race to compete in the global marketplace.

In addition to these unrealistic expectations, since 1980, public education has been victimized by those who, while holding the highest office in the public school system, deliberately attempted, and continue to attempt, to destroy the system. Foremost among these are former secretaries of education, William Bennett and Lamar Alexander.

Ronald Reagan entered the presidency with an educational agenda of school prayer, tuition tax cuts and vouchers. George Bush pushed even more energetically for privatization of schools. During the twelve years of these administrations, reports containing positive comments and findings about American schools were deliberately suppressed. The assault continues. On July 18, 1996, Presidential candidate, Robert Dole, spoke on education, once again calling for vouchers to privatize the system. According to reports on National Public Radio, the speech was written by Bennett and Alexander, who "sat nearby, smiling as it was delivered."

But people like Bennett and Alexander, driven with a strange mixture of ideology, expedience, and belief in a free market approach to schools, were hardly alone. Many educators have also been critical of public schools and attacked their performance with an intensity unlike that found directed at any other institution in public affairs. Consider these three comments:

• The achievement of U. S. students in grades k-12 is very poor.
• American students are performing at much lower levels than students in other industrialized nations.
• International examinations designed to compare students from all over the world usually show American students at or near the bottom.

These are powerful indictments. As we shall see, none of them is true, but their source is as remarkable as their content. These are the opening sentences from three consecutive 1993 weekly columns in the New York Times by Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers. One would think that, if only to mollify the 800,000 members of his union, Shanker would be a little more enthusiastic about what his teachers have accomplished. While Shanker might be a little more abrasive than most, many within the field of education have shown minimal support for public schools. After all, virtually all of the 43 background papers commissioned by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the group that produced " Nation At Risk," were authored by professors of education.

It is impossible to imagine a Secretary of Defense lambasting the weapons industry or a Secretary of Commerce chastising American industry for its accomplishments the way Secretaries of Education have demeaned the performance of American public schools. How and why did people within the field arrive at such a view of the schools and what does the evidence really say?

We begin the chronicle in 1893 with the Committee on Secondary Schools Studies, better known simply as The Committee of Ten after its makeup of five college presidents and five public school superintendents. The Committee of Ten can be considered the first in a long line of "Blue Ribbon Commissions" to examine American education.

When the Committee of Ten began its work, there was little to examine and, indeed, the principal goal of the Committee was to bring some kind of coherence to a "system" that had largely grown without organization or clarity of purpose. In 1890, we were a nation of 63,000,000 people, but only 203,000 of them attended secondary school. Another 3,000,000 age-eligible children were not enrolled. A nation of learners, indeed! In fact, one wonders from the Committee's report, what those children who were enrolled in school did all day:

Why were the children's heads so empty? A look at what went on in schools provides part of the answer. Contemporary critics often claim that life in classrooms hasn't changed in a century. The reflections of educator, Ralph Tyler, however, contradict this contention. Tyler was one of the most prolific writers and innovators the field has known, working actively until his death in 1994 at age 92. Among other things, Tyler directed the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University for a number of years was also the principal architect of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the 1960's. When a mere sprite of 72, Tyler looked back on what schools had been like and had this to say:

Other accounts confirm Tyler's comment on the prevalence of recitation as the principal classroom activity. Tyler's school does not strike one as an institution to inspire a generation of life-long learners. Indeed, one can wonder how any scholars emerged from such stultifying environments.

After the Committee of Ten's 1893 report, secondary education expanded rapidly, but remained in disarray as educators debated what the high school curriculum should look like. The School Review, the principal journal of secondary education at the time, was filled with titles cast as questions: "What Should the Modern Secondary School Aim To Accomplish?" "What Studies Should Predominate in Secondary School?" "What Ought the Study of Mathematics Contribute to the Education of the High School Pupil?" "What is the Consensus of Opinion as to the Place of Science in the Preparatory Schools?" Can American History Be Put Into All Courses in the High School?" This is a partial list of titles from the 1897 volume alone.

As educators attempted to answer such questions, they ignored two aspects of education that dominate current discussion: the outcomes of education and the school-to-work transition. Although few students graduated from high school and few of those went on to college, the secondary curriculum was oriented towards providing courses acceptable to the institutions of higher education. Indeed, the colleges and universities were seen, at least implicitly, as the keepers of educational standards. The Committee of Ten, in any case, recommended a high school curriculum that we today would call college preparatory.

In addition, the field's thinking about pedagogy was dominated at the time by faculty psychology. Faculty psychology contended that the mind consisted of faculties which were quite analogous to muscles. Like muscles, faculties grew and were strengthened through exercise. The principal means of exercising the faculties were mathematics, Greek and Latin. Natural sciences were only beginning to attain credibility as courses of study on a par with these three. No one, apparently, had thought about developing any direct measures of these faculties and their proper use in order to determine how well the schools were developing them.

There is, at this time, no concern for any vocational aspect of schools. In addition to getting students ready for college, schools retained the civic functions Jefferson had sought for them. Schools had been recognized as important ladders up the scale of economic well being, but there is no indication that anyone thought that schools themselves were important to the well being of the nation (at the elementary level, schools civic function did include the Americanization of immigrants). How could such a sparsely attended institution as the high school have much to say on this matter? The notion that schools were somehow important to the well being of the nation would await end of World War II.

The years from 1910 to 1945 saw a rapid expansion in secondary school with the graduation rate rising from 10% to 45%. The expansion does not seem to have been accompanied by any coherence however. In 1932, the Progressive Education Association noted that secondary education "did not have a clear purpose...it did not prepare students adequately for the responsibilities of community life....The high school seldom challenged the student of first-rate ability to work up to the level of his intellectual powers....The conventional high school curriculum was far removed from the real concerns of youth....Finally, the relation of school and college was unsatisfactory to both institutions". (All emphases in the original).

The latter assertion was likely only half true. The PEA noted that although few students went to college, the curriculum was geared exclusively to their needs. At the 1932 PEA convention where these issues were addressed, one observer noted that proposals to change secondary schools were all met with "Yes, that should be done in our high schools, but it can't be done without risking the students' chances of being admitted to college."

Criticism during this period was, in the words of one observer "always abundant," but it hadn't taken on the tone that schools had failed. Since 1912, the United States had become obsessed with efficiency. A certain Frederick Taylor's had come on the scene touting something he called "scientific management." In this, the decade of the muckrakers, Taylor's concerns with efficiency became immensely popular. In the schools, scientific management had little to do with what students were learning or how well, but with efficiencies of various sorts that would save money. The comment of the California Taxpayers Association, is typical:

It is to be emphasized that this concern with efficiency had nothing to do with learning. As one reads the American School Boards Journal of these years, the principal forum for school administrators, one finds little said about learning and a great deal said about counting. In Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Raymond Callahan refers to this period and its activities and "The Descent Into Trivia." It produced such books as Economy in Education in which U.S. Commissioner of Education, William J. Cooper noted that

Cooper then gave a series of suggestions for economizing:

On the matter of school paper, Cooper noted

The few studies that did look at academic outcomes of education found them wanting, but the authors of the reports did not seem inclined to blame the schools. Through the history department of Columbia University, the New York Times studied students' knowledge of American history and geography. The Times was appalled at the results:

"Hundreds of students thought Walt Whitman was a bandleader," huffed the Gray Lady. Since the editors made no further comment on this finding, we can conclude that they did not make the connection to Paul Whiteman, a popular jazz orchestra leader of the day.

The Times also did not comment on what surely was the most damning aspect of its findings: the study had been conducted on college freshmen. At the time, about 45% of students graduated from high school and of these, about 15% went on to college. Thus the survey had uncovered not just a group of ignoramuses but an elite group of ignoramuses.

The Times was incensed enough to put the story on page 1, next to its major headline of the day "Patton Attacks East of El Guettar." It devoted several pages inside to the results. But it made no attempt to discover why students knew so little or to lay blame. It described the study as one to discover how much material learned in secondary school was retained in college. At the time, colleges argued that they did not need to teach history because it had been taught to all in high school. Finding little retention, the Times dismissed this argument. Apparently, the Times assumed that the students once knew the material and had simply forgotten it. It did not consider the possibility that the material was not taught or was taught poorly.

After World War II, though, the educational failings of students were more and more ascribed to problems in the schools. In the immediate post-war period one finds for the first time declarations of decline and a sense that things used to be better. The criticism from World War II was so chronic and intense that in 1989 the eminent education historian, Lawrence Cremin, looked back in perplexity:

Indeed, that is the question. The answer is complex.

In part it lies in the very success of schools at providing nearly universal secondary education. At the end of the war, secondary enrollments approached 90%. Not all were exposed to the same curriculum, however. In 1945, a conference asked how the schools should cope with theirs expanding clientele. At the time, many educators were strongly influenced by the recently developed field of psychometrics--test making. Many testmakers claimed that intellectual ability was inherited and that, overall, such ability was distributed in the national population in a normal curve. With these notions in mind, the conference decided that no more than 20% of high school students would ever go to college. Another 20% could be handled adequately by the recently developed vocational programs. That left 60% of the students with no curriculum that served their needs.

The conference decided to build a curriculum for this "forgotten 60%" around the "needs of students". These needs led to the development of what the conferees called Life Adjustment Education. Life Adjustment Education was a genuine adapt secondary schools to an increasingly diverse population, but it was based on the assumption that the students couldn't be challenged academically. It was an intellectually weak pedagogy and open to easy ridicule. How would the "needs of students" be determined? In many instances, through the administration of questionnaires to the students themselves. But teenagers then, as today, saw their needs in terms of how to make friends, get along with the opposite sex and a host of other short-term "needs."

The faculties of arts and sciences in various universities already harbored suspicions about the intellectual capacity of schools of education. When these schools now started discussing Life Adjustment Education, the liberal arts faculties exploded in derision. Progressive Education with its emphasis on the present was bad enough. Life Adjustment Education was intolerable.

Foremost among the Life Adjustment critics was Arthur Bestor, a professor of history at the University of Illinois. Bestor's popular 1953 book was titled, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat From Learning in Our Public Schools. Note the word "retreat." This appears to be the first time that a critique of the schools harkened back to a previous time when conditions were better.

Bestor loaded Wastelands with statistics to show that schools were, indeed retreating. He observed, for instance, that "Fifty years ago, half of all students in public schools were studying Latin; today less than a quarter are enrolled in courses in all foreign languages." Bestor failed to note that 50 years prior to his book, only 50% of students were enrolled in any school and only 7% of all students graduated from high school. A quarter of the current crop of students was actually a higher proportion of all students than half of the students 50 years earlier.

Thus, part of the sense of failure stemmed from criticism of attempts to adapt the school to what were referred to as the "new learners." A more important part of the sense of failure derived from America's changed role in the world. No longer able to retreat into isolationism, the U. S. now confronted the Soviet Union for ideological and technological domination of the globe, seeking to win the space and weapons races without destroying the globe in the process. Wrote the Committee on the Clear and Present Danger, "we need not only trained men but also the most modern weapons....This means we need both a reservoir of trained men and a continuing advance on every scientific and technical front." "It is men that count," said James B. Conant, former President of Harvard and critic of American high schools.

The most vocal commentator on the need for manpower was Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, widely credited with the development of America's nuclear navy. "Let us never forget," said Rickover," that there can be no second place in a contest with Russia and that there will be no second chance if we lose." Armed with statistics from Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, Rickover stumped the country and harangued congressmen on the need for more scientists, engineers and mathematicians. The Russians, Dulles' statistics allegedly showed, were outstripping us in these vital areas.

Where would we get the man power we needed? Well, where else, but the schools. For the first time, people looked at schools as playing a role in national security. And they weren't carrying their weight.

Into this tense, insecure atmosphere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to circle the globe. To the school critics, this small sphere offered proof that they had been right. The schools were failing. Sputnik was flung into orbit in October, 1957. By March, 1958, Life magazine, among others, had readied a long, four-part series on "The Crisis in Education." The cover of the March 24, 1958 edition showed a stern-looking Alexei Kutzkov staring out from Moscow, while Stephen Lapekas gazed out from Chicago with an easy smile. Inside, pictures showed Kutzkov conducting complex experiments in physics and chemistry and even reading Sister Carrie out loud in English class. Lapekas was shown walking hand-in-hand with his girl friend, rehearsing a musical and in other activities that stressed the social and downplayed the academic, a life without rigor. In the one picture that dealt with academics, Lapekas is headed back from the blackboard in mathematics class, laughing as are his classmates. The text advises that "Stephen amused the class with wisecracks about his ineptitude."

Life brought hire in Sloan Wilson, author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, for a two-page essay "It's Time to Close Our Circus." As with Bestor, Wilson saw failure and a decline from previous accomplishments:

We can note here that the next great event in the history of school criticism, the publication in 1983 of "A Nation At Risk," discovered a "rising tide of mediocrity." But Wilson had found a similar current almost precisely 25 years earlier. We can note, too, that at the time there was precious little data about school performance, but what there was contradicted Wilson and other critics. Although the number of people taking the SAT had increased from 10,654 in 1941 to 376,800 in 1957, the scores remained at the 1941 levels. The SAT's were at the level established in the standard-setting year of 1941. Scores on achievement tests had been rising a number of years.

We can note, too, that although "A Nation At Risk" was the next great event, the interim was scarcely without criticism of the schools. American schools have often been faulted for not solving social problems and in the Sixties, they were harshly criticized for failing to achieve racial integration soon enough. While schools were taking the blame for continued segregation, the verdict arrived on the grand curriculum reforms that followed Sputnik: they had failed.

Great hopes had been held out for the New Math and its attendant reform in other fields. Prominent professors had given up their research and publishing careers to develop these curricula. That the new curricula were being developed by some of the finest minds at some of our finest universities was initially thought to be their greatest strength. Later, these qualities were recognized as their greatest weakness. Although eminent in their fields, the had no knowledge of the dynamics of a classroom. They tried to create materials that "would permit scholars to speak directly to the child," without the intervention of teachers, whose abilities were suspect. The materials should be "teacher-proof." This feature alone guaranteed failure.

About the same time as judgments arrived on the failure of the new curricula, so did books such as Death at an Early Age, 36 Children, and The Way It Spozed To Be. While most of these books described how schools were failing minority students, some, like How Children Fail general indictments of schools and led to a widespread feeling that schools were simply not good places for children to be. "Free schools" and "alternative schools" began to spring up around the country. The anti-school feeling was summed up in Charles Silberman's authoritative tome, Crisis in the Classroom.

Silberman's opus appeared in 1970. The red menace still hung over our heads. Domestic events had created the feeling that nothing was secure: The Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Summer of Love,Vietnam, Watts and the many urban uprisings that followed, the Chicago Police Riot, the Vietnam Moratorium, Kent State. Fortress America seemed very vulnerable, indeed, to both physical and cultural barbarians.

In this milieu, Silberman asked what the fuss was all about. He observed that in a review of 186 "then and now" studies, all but ten had favored "now." Then-and-now studies compare achievement at two points in time. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare examined the review and concluded that "until better evidence is presented, the tentative judgment must be that American children in the sixties are learning more than their older brothers and sisters learned in the fifties."

Silberman was perplexed. "Why, then, the pervasive sense of crisis? How to explainthe fact that an educational system that appears to be superbly successful from one standpoint appears to be in grave trouble from another?" Silberman clearly had the social unrest of both urban blacks and suburban whites in mind when he answered and his answer sounded very much like Samuelson 25 years later:

But such improvements in schools as Silberman found did not mean there was no crisis:

Thus Silberman rejected the nostalgia of many critics, but found a crisis in the relationship between what schools are and what they could be. Silberman accepted that kids were learning more and concentrated more on the quality of life in schools. He found it wanting, to say the least:

It is not clear how accurate Silberman's characterization of schools really was, but it fit well with the descriptions found in some of the other books mentioned above. To cure the ills, Silberman offered the same prescription that Joseph Featherstone had offered three years earlier in three articles in the New Republic: open education, a British import.

Silberman's acknowledgment that children knew more than ever appeared early in the book, but was lost in the next 500 pages describing the "crisis" and how to cure it. Whatever currency it might have had was lost seven years later when the College Board called attention to what was then a little attended fact: SAT scores had been falling for fourteen years. It formed a panel headed by former Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz to study the decline.

The Wirtz panel attributed most of the decline to changes in who was taking the test: more women, more minorities. The co-chair of the panel, former U.S. Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe II, wrote an article "Let's Have Another SAT Decline." Howe contended that the civil rights agenda of education was unfinished, that the doors needed to be opened wider and if this caused the scores to drop again, so what?

The Wirtz panel emphasized the complexity of the decline. One of its background papers simply listed the number of hypotheses brought forward to explain the fall: there were 79 of them, not including one from a physicist that it had was due to the radioactive fallout from the nuclear testing programs of the Fifties.

The media and the public had a simpler interpretation. While the developers of the SAT referred to it as a "mere supplement," the public now saw it as the platinum rod for measuring school performance. The performance was falling. The stage was set for "A Nation At Risk."

Beginning in 1980, a new diagnosis about what was wrong with American schools appeared and a new prescription was brought forward about how to cure the crisis in American education. Policy papers written for presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, concluded that the [putative] decline of American schools was largely due to a force heretofore seen as a powerful remedy: the federal government. Following arguments made by Milton Friedman in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, advisers to Reagan argued that the U.S. Department of Education, only recently elevated to cabinet status, should be abolished. In addition, tuition tax credits and vouchers should be provided to parents to permit them to choose where to send their kids to school. In the free-market system that would follow this program, good schools would flourish, bad schools would go out of business. Previous perceptions of educational problems and/or decline had resulted in increased federal efforts. Those efforts, the new philosophy contended, were part and parcel of the problem.

Reagan appointed Terrel Bell as Secretary of Education with the, no doubt apocryphal, instructions to not bother packing a suitcase for the trip from Utah to Washington (Reagan had promised to abolish the department). In his book about life with a boss who is trying to do away with you, Bell reported he heard constant criticisms about the state of American education and began to long for an event that, like Sputnik, would shake us out of our complacency. No such event was forthcoming and Bell fell back on establishing a blue ribbon commission.

It is clear that this group, the National Commission on Educational Excellence was not free to peruse the data and establish the actual condition of America's schools. Nor did they concern themselves with the quality-of-life issues that Silberman had addressed. The commission was there to document all of the terrible things Bell had heard. And that is what it did. Its report, "A Nation At Risk," is one of the most selective uses of data for propaganda purposes in the history of education. After its opening statement about the tide of mediocrity and how, if an unfriendly foreign power had foisted our schools on us we might have considered it an act of war, "Risk" went on to list 13 indicators of why we are a nation at risk. As noted, these indicators are highly selected and presented in misleading statements.

For instance, one says, "there was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973 and 1977." This statement, as far as it goes, is true. But a disinterested observer would note immediately that it does not go far. Why does it pick on 17-year-olds? Why does it pick on science? The answer is: it is only the trend of science scores for 17-year-olds that supports the crisis rhetoric. The science scores of 9- and 13-year olds do not. The reading and math scores of 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and mathematics were all either steady or rising. Of nine trend lines, only one could be used to allege a crisis. That was the one the commission reported.

"Risk" caused a riff in the White House. Adviser Edward Meese urged Reagan not to accept it because, although highly critical of schools, it did not address any of his education agenda: there was no mention of choice, vouchers, tax credits or school prayer. Chief of Staff James Baker and adviser Michael Deaver, on the other hand, thought that the document contained sufficient fodder for campaigning that it should be embraced anyway and it was.

The education community should have risen to its feet and said of "Risk," "This is garbage." Which it was. But many educational organizations' policies are influenced by how they see an event affecting the availability of funds. "Risk" depicted problems. Surely that meant, as it had in the past, that money would flow in order to fix them. "Risk" was widely, enthusiastically accepted by educational organizations, if not by people at the building level.

"Risk" contained a new and powerful, if erroneous, conclusion: that the schools are tightly linked to the performance of the U.S. economy and our ability to compete in the global marketplace. In fact, "competition in the global marketplace" soon became the cliche of the 80's. It replaced the "red menace" as a scare phrase. When a recession arrived in the late 1980's, this putative link allowed people to blame the schools. The schools are not, of course, tightly linked to the performance of economies, ours or others. Historian Cremin noted this very clearly:

Crass effort or not, it worked and continues to work. Fortunately, the economy has not listened. Starting in 1994, one began to see headlines heralding the recovery: "The American Economy, Back On Top" trumpeted the Sunday business section of the New York Times. "America Cranks It Up," said Business Week at the same time. The Geneva-based World Economic Forum pronounced the U.S. economy the most competitive in the world among 25 developed nations in both 1994 and 1995. In 1996, the Forum changed its formula and the U.S. "fell" to fourth place. The International Institute for Management retained a formula similar to the Forum's old one and the U.S. maintained its place as number one.

Stanford University professor, Larry Cuban, noting that the schools were blamed for the recession of the late Eighties and given no credit for the recovery of the nineties, observed like Cremin before him that the link was not there. To use the title of Cuban's article on the topic, the link between schools and the economy is "The Great School Scam."

The lack of a link between the schools and economic health can be seen in Germany and Japan. Critics of American public education generally accord these two nations to have excellent schools. If that is true (there is evidence that it is not) and if the link to the economy exists, then these two countries, not the United States should be dazzling us with their economic health. Yet they remain mired in long term recessions, their worst recessions since World War II. Fortune magazine appears to have accurately if inelegantly summarized the situation with its March, 1996 cover. Thereon was the face of Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan and the words "It's His economy stupid."

Yet people continue to link schools and the economy in ways unflattering to the schools. "The system is broken," said IBM CEO, Louis V. Gerstner referring to the schools at the "summit" he organized with the nation's governors in March, 1996. Since the summit emphasized technology, some saw Gerstner's comments as self serving, coming from a man with computers to sell.

In the debate over schools and their relationship to the economy, there has been a not-so-subtle shift in talk about the purpose of schooling. The civic functions of schooling have been lost. There is some talk about the importance of schooling to personal advancement. But most discussions about schooling have been cast in the dreary instrumentality of getting a job, or, to use the cliche of the moment, the "school-to-work" transition. The talk is of what business needs--demands!--of schools and how schools should supply it.

This is perhaps the moment for a minor digression to observe that there has never been anything approaching unanimity on the purpose of education in this nation or elsewhere. Aristotle, after all, observed that education dealt with "the good life" and that people would always disagree on what the good life consisted of. To see it solely in terms of getting and keeping a job, though, is rather new to this country.

Our pre-eminent educational influence, Thomas Jefferson, had seen education as having two purposes. On the one hand it would act as a great sorting machine that would insure that "the best geniuses would be annually raked from the rubbish" creating an "aristocracy of worth and genius" as opposed to an aristocracy of blood that so afflicted Europe. On the other hand, to protect the nation from the "germ of corruption" that Jefferson saw as infecting all governments, the power had to ultimately reside in the people and to protect even them, "their minds must be improved to a certain degree" through schooling for all.

Even Jefferson's more practical peer, Benjamin Franklin, did not argue for vocational training in school. Noting that people in a developing nation would need many skills, Franklin saw his own Philadelphia school as a place where young men "will come out...fitted for learning any business calling or profession." Franklin sounds eerily like Secretary of Labor Reich contending that the most valuable skill that might be learned in school today is "flexibility." In any case, specific vocational concerns began to creep into educational discussion early in this century as secondary schooling began its rapid expansion.

Some of the possible purposes of education are in direct conflict and, therefore, to the extent that schooling is promoting one goal, it will be de-emphasizing another. For instance, a school system that emphasizes preparing students for a world of work cannot simultaneously prepare them to be the critical thinkers called for in a democratic society. A totalitarian society can simply tell people what to think and, as many have observed, independent thinking in totalitarian society can be dangerous to one's health. In a democracy, though, one must be able to critique and evaluate information for its veracity, rejecting those who cannot provide sufficient warrant for their claims. Those concerned with individual liberties have distorted the purposes of such work-oriented aspects of some education reforms such as "lifelong learning," seeing them, in at least one instance as directly come to us from Chinese communist society. There is no doubt, though, reading many of the job-oriented reform documents, that part of what is desired is an expert and skilled workforce, yes, but also a docile one.

When Dwight Eisenhower left office, he warned us of a "military-industrial-complex" that could subvert democracy. If he were around today, he would no doubt warn of a "government-industrial-complex" in which the needs of the people are subordinated to the needs of industry and in which all human interaction is reduced to a commercial exchange. This is part of "A Nation At Risk's" legacy.

"A Nation At Risk" did not address the issue of school choice, but it has served as powerful rhetoric to those advocating giving people some say in where their children go to school. In addition, as part of a strategy of softening up the public to permit the transfer of public funds to private institutions, the Reagan and Bush administrations refused to say anything good about American public schools and accentuated anything that cast them in a negative light.

Thus: When a large federally funded report concluded that there was no crisis in American education, the Bush administration suppressed it.

Thus: when an international comparison of mathematics and science appeared to show American students performing poorly (the U. S. ranks were mostly low, but the students performance was quite average), a press conference was called and the results received wide play from both print and electronic media. On the other hand, when an international comparison of reading skills in 31 nations found American students second in the world and found the best U.S. readers--the 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles--outscoring all countries, no attempt was made to tell anyone and not one media outlet carried the results. The study was eventually discovered by Education Week which carried it on page 1. Even then, only one other media source, USA Today played off of Education Week's story. And the USA Today article carried a quote from a deputy assistant secretary of education dismissing the study.

Similarly, following "Risk" there was a lot of sentiment among high education officials that teachers were at fault. Afterall, everyone knew that high school seniors who said they intended to major in education had lower SAT scores than those for other intended majors. The U. S. Department of Education commissioned a study to document the stupidity of the teaching corps. However, the study showed that teachers-to-be have college grade point averages as high as any other major in the first two years of colleges--before they start to take the reputedly grade-inflated education courses. The study was never published.

Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories conducted a large, systematic study of the U.S. educational system and concluded that while the system had problems, it was not in crisis and that, indeed, it was performing much better than people thought. The study was suppressed. The official reason given was that it was undergoing "peer review." As Daniel Tanner point out, however, such "peer review" of one U.S. Department by others was unprecedented. I saw two of the reviews, one from the National Science Foundation and one from the U. S. Department of Education and can report that both were patently political in their criticisms. The "Sandia Report" as it came to be known, was completed in later 1990, but never published before the Bush Administration was replaced (although it was widely circulate by those who found out about it). It eventually saw print as the entirety of the May/June, 1993 issue of the Journal of Educational Research.

There have also been deliberate attempts to mislead Americans about their schools. In 1993, William Bennett released numbers purporting to show that there is no relationship between state-level SAT scores and money spent on education. This report was widely disseminated by the Heritage Foundation and the table was reproduced in the Wall Street Journal. The Heritage Foundation's Candidate's Handbook, 1996 reproduces the numbers once again. Yet, people, including Bennett, have known for years that the principal source of differences among states is the proportion of seniors taking the SAT. In Utah and Mississippi, only 4% of the seniors take the test and this tiny elite does well. In Connecticut, 82% of the senior class huddles in angst on Saturday mornings to bubble in answer sheets. With 4/5 of its senior class taking the test, Connecticut is digging much deeper into its talent pool and that excavation shows up in lower scores.

Bennett knew that the SAT was not a test that could be used across all states. When he was Secretary of Education, he released annual charts ranking states on a variety of indicators. But those charts divided the states into two categories before any rankings were made: states that used the SAT and states that used the other college entrance test battery, the ACT. When it comes to reporting educational data, the compiler of The Book of Virtues has been quite willing to ignore two of them, truth and honesty.

Why would people deliberately attempt to put the worst possible face on American education? Motives are sometimes difficult to ascribe but it is clear that some of the critics truly believe that a free market system would improve schools (there is little actual evidence that this might happen; results from the British choice system indicate that the negative outcomes outweigh the positives; results from the only U. S. study adequately evaluated concluded that public school students actually outperformed those who were sent by the study to private schools). There are those, both with Catholic school backgrounds and with fundamentalist affiliations, who would like to see private religious schools receive public funds without the usual proscription against teaching religion or engaging in religious practices. And, finally, there are those who see the public school system as one of the few remaining untapped markets, as a place to make enormous profits. The social consequences be damned.

The constant stream of negativity has created a climate in which the media accentuate the negative and even make errors because numbers, although false, corroborate what we all know is wrong. For instance, in 1993, the usually reliable Education Week conducted a 10-year retrospective on what had happened since "A Nation At Risk" had appeared. The answer, essentially, was "not much." The paper reported that the "proportion of high school students who perform at high levels remains infinitesimally small. For instance, in the last decade the number and proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT verbal and mathematics test has declined." In a box next to the text, the paper put the numbers that confirmed the fall. But a close check revealed that while the numbers for 1982 were accurate, the numbers for 1992 were only for students scoring between 650 and 690, omitting all of the students between 700 and 800, the maximum SAT score. When those were added in, the numbers scoring above 650 rose for both tests and the proportion for mathematics attained a record high. In the three years since, the proportion of high scorers has continued to rise. Heritage Foundation fellow, Denis Doyle, writing in The Candidate's Handbook, 1996, ascribed the growth to the performance of Asian American students. It is true that Asian American students do score much higher on the SAT-M than other ethnic groups, but the account for far too few test takers to cause much of the growth. In fact, there has been a 74% increase in the proportion of students scoring above 650 since 1981. If one omits Asian students from the sample, one still sees a 57% increase from 1981 to 1995.

In late 1996, most of the statistics indicate the same thing as Silberman found 25 years earlier. The data favor "now" over "then:" achievement test scores are at record levels, the number of students taking Advanced Placement examinations has been soaring even as the number of students declined each year after the baby boom passed through. Seven of the nine trends in reading, mathematics, and science of the National Assessment of Educational Progress are at all-time highs. If the demographic changes in who takes the SAT are factored out, there remains only a small decline in the verbal score and none at all in mathematics. As noted earlier, the proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT mathematics test is at an all-time high and U.S. students are near the top in reading and average in mathematics and science.

The biggest threat to the U.S. educational system comes from those who, for various reasons, advocate the privatization of schools. These have mostly retreated from the grand plans envisioned by Reagan and Bush. They have jumped on the latest educational bandwagon, charter schools, in hopes of using them as Trojan Horses for larger choice programs in the future.