Sometimes a piece of disinformation is so bad, you don't criticize it or put it right, but just hope that other people will simply not notice it. That's what I hoped for Martin Gross's miserable The Conspiracy of Ignorance. I was invited by the Cato Institute to hear him talk about his book. Seeing its title, I prepared a fact sheet and handed it out to most of the audience before being stopped by some public information officer (a bit ironic that this libertarian think tank would censor me). I thought that the major papers had chucked this book into the round file, but last Sunday, it showed up in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, which every three months morphs into "The Education Review." Since some of you might have seen that piece, it is debunked below. The original message went to a group of about 12 Washington Post education reporters.

To obtain the statistic that the Post reviewer cites (described below), Gross subtracted the average SAT total score of high school seniors who indicated that they were going to major in education from the average SAT total score for all seniors.

----- Original Message -----
From: Gerald W. Bracey
To: Education Reporters
Subject: competence

The first third of Jabari Asim's reviews in the Nov. 13 Washington Post Magazine Education Review is a disgrace. Martin Gross is a shyster. To call him a used car saleman would be to honor him. I caught his sleazy performance this fall at the Cato Institute and was appalled. I had hoped that his lousy book had been overlooked or, more hopefully, that reviewers at the various papers had read it and seen it for what it is: shit.

Let's just take the one example that Asim uses: "The typical college bound senior may well have some 50 points more on his SATs than did his or her teachers at the same period of life." This is an old canard, or rather, red herring, to invoke a more appropriate animal. It is predicated on the self report of high school seniors. Those who say they intend to major in education have lower SAT's than those who intend to major in most--but not all--other subjects.

Gross' statistic, of course, presumes a few things that aren't true: a) the SAT is a good indicator of how good a teacher a 17-year-old will become; b) high school seniors know what the hell they are going to do with their college lives; and c) only those who say they're going to major in education become teachers. As if no biology or English majors do. Absurd. It also presumes something we can't know. It presumes that everyone who indicated education on the Self Descriptive Questionnaire actually became a teacher, something that is also manifestly absurd.

It seems to me that a little critical thought by Asim could have revealed these problems in Gross' glib numbers.

The statistic is also confounded with gender: Most education majors are women and women score lower. They do better, however, in college. One study of 45,000 students--by ETS--found that women scored 45 points lower on the SAT-M but had higher grades in every kind of freshman math course--algebra, calculus, regular frosh math, advanced math--except remedial where there was no difference.

Two studies refute the conclusions based on high school SAT data. One, which was actually commissioned by the Reagan Department of Education to show that people who go into teaching aren't very bright, clearly repudiated this contention. Its most important finding was that at the end of the college sophomore year--that is, before future teachers started taking those gut ed school courses--they had grades as high as other majors. Another finding was that there was no downward trend in the achievement of future teachers over time. The author of this study recounted to me that when he provided the results to the Department in an oral presentation, "The political appointees were not pleased."

A second study, also by ETS and published this year, found that teachers have much higher scores on prose, document and quantitative literacy tests than adults in the public at large. When matched against other adults with bachelor's degrees, they scored just as high. When matched against people who had graduate study, teachers with graduate study scored just as high.

It would be very nice if education writers and editors would ask themselves a few critical questions before reporting a statistic like Gross'. At his Cato shtick, Gross played the teacher stat for a laugh. Given the audience, he got one (his is a routine more appropriate to the Catskills than to Cato; I think the Cato people who shared the podium were actually embarrased some of the time).

I have a book coming out next year that is designed, in part, to make non-researchers smarter readers of statistics. One third of it is called "Principles of Data Intepretation in Educational Research, or, How Not To Get Statistically Snookered by Politicians, Ideologues, Incompetents and Crooks, or, Crap-Detecting in the Best Ernest Hemingway Tradition." In a 1965 interview, Hemingway was asked what it took to make a good writer. The only quality he could come up with as an indefatiguable crap detector. I wish Asim's had been turned on.

For penance, he/she can read the forthcoming book, and in the meantime, do penance by reading my earlier Setting the Record Straight, which is a compendium of actual facts about the condition of public education in America.

I will say that for all of the garbage Grossed dumped on us at Cato that day, he did have one moment that for me was wonderfully redeeming: The Cato people, David Boaz and someone whose name eludes me, used Gross' performance to argue that the American "government schools" had failed and that clearly what was called for was a market-driven school system. This struck something deep and deeply emotional in Gross and for the only moment of the day, he forgot about his shtick, he forgot where he was. He is the son of poor Hungarian Jews, and, like so many eastern European immigrants in the 1930's, made his way through the NYC public schools and CCNY. This led him to reject the market approach. Our schools are in crisis, he said, but they must be saved. Too bad he took the tack of presenting so many slanted, spun, distorted and simply false facts to accomplish this goal.

What a way to spend a Saturday morning.

Sincerely,



Gerald W. Bracey