February 16, 2000 was the best disinformation day so far in the new century. Bennett and Finn were in full fulmination on the pages of the Washington Times while Gross was spinning statistics and standing logic on its head in Education Week.

Bennett and Finn plump for the "simple but revolutionary program known as 'Straight A's.'" "Necessity is the mother of invention. Under Straight A's the old excuses--blaming poverty, teachers, and local school boards--would be rejected….The accountability buck stops with the governors." The House has passed a version, the Senate looks ready to reject; Clinton ready to veto if necessary.

In order to set up their case for Straight A's, Bennett and Finn playfully spin the numbers: "Although the United States spends more than 8 percent of its gross domestic product--a total of $664 billion--on education, nearly 60 percent of our low-income 4^th graders (and 40 percent of all 4^th graders) cannot read at a basic level. On recent international tests of math and science, our high school seniors ranked near the bottom of industrialized nations; in mathematics, only Cyprus and South Africa faired worse."

In the first place, the $664 billion, while accurate, also includes spending at the college level. Elementary and secondary spending consume less than half total, a figure that ranks us average among OECD nations.

Second, the reading figures come from the NAEP proficiency levels which everyone except Bennett and Finn knows are irrationally high and misleading (they know it too, but the author of The Book of Virtues has consistently rejected two of them, truth and honesty). Studies by the GAO, CRESST and, most recently, the National Research Council, have urged that the levels, which Finn railroaded in while reigning over NAGB, be abandoned because the process for setting them is "fundamentally flawed." These same 4^th graders who can't read somehow managed to finish second in the world in the most recent international comparison of reading, a study which somehow Bennett and Finn managed to overlook--so did Gross who also cites the 40% figure; at least he was more current. Forty-percent is from the 1994 assessment; in 1998 it was 38%.

Their verdict on our high school seniors can be your verdict too only if you accept the validity of the TIMSS Final Year Study. No reasonable person does this although otherwise sophisticated people like Bill Schmidt, Al Beaton, and Pat Forgione seem to forget everything they ever learned about research methodology when talking about this study.

They--and Bennett and Finn--ignore the fact that only 5 nations met the study's own criteria for valid data. They ignore the impact of working at a paid job on US scores--55% of American seniors in TIMSS said they work more than 21 hours a week at a job, something known to depress school achievement and it certainly showed in their TIMSS scores. Twenty-seven percent said they worked more than 35 hours a week. They outscored Cyprus by a single point.

In most countries, you're either a student or a worker, not both. American students who worked less than 20 hours a week were at the international average (which, ultimately, is meaningless because the data are irreparably flawed; they were reported because U. S. taxpayers forked over $51 million for TIMSS and only the Department of Defense can spend that kind of money and not show anything for it).

Bennett and Finn ignore the fact that our sample included students taking pre-calculus, "just to see how they'd do," one TIMSS staffer told me. Well, they did awful. No wonder: 23% of the Advanced Math test items presume the testtaker has also taken calculus. American students who had, were average and 100 points higher than those who were taking precalculus. Such complications have no place in the Bennett-Finn scheme of hyper-simplistic data and policy making. See my May and September, 1998 articles in Phi Delta Kappan and Iris Rotberg's article in the May 15, 1998 issue of Science for details on the hoax known as TIMSS Final Year.

For his part, Gross invents an entirely new system of American education: "Since education schools usually have lower admission standards than regular liberal arts and sciences colleges, they attract a weaker student body." Gee, I recall a time when you were admitted to a college and decided two years later what you would major in.

Gross claims that high school students who say they intend to major in education scored only 964 on the SAT while the average student scored 1016. Gross knows that this statistic is irrelevant, but uses an equally irrelevant study to try and justify it.

Gross claims that Eugene Hickock, Secretary of Education in Pennsylvania "studied the high school grades of every teacher trainee in the state's 91 colleges." They averaged C+, says Gross, "well below the norm." Of course, a just ever so slightly more salient statistic would be how they were doing in college.

Two questions need be asked about this study: 1) Does it exist? 2) if it exists, was it legal and/or ethical? The people I spoke with at the Pennsylvania Department of Education never heard of it. Press relations spokesman, Dan Langan, said they were checking Gross' article for "possible errors of fact." Langan assures me that the PDE collects and maintains absolutely no individual data like this at the state level. This means that Hickock would have first had to identify the students in the 91 colleges and then either get the colleges to send him the transcripts (would they?) or contact the hundreds of high schools the students would have attended. This would have been an extremely laborious procedure and not a smart expenditure of taxpayer money. One wonders indeed, if Gross' statement contains "errors of fact". If the study exists, does the Secretary of Education have any business snooping on the transcripts of Pennsylvania students?

The only large scale study of the future teachers and the rest of the world found that after two years in college, future teachers had a GPA the same as those planning to pursue other occupations. That is, the GPAs were the same before anyone declared themselves education majors and started taking the gut courses of the ed schools.

Just as importantly, when ETS researchers looked at data from the National Adult Literacy Survey, they found that "teachers perform as well as other college-educated adults across all three literacy scales [prose, document, and quantitative]. Teachers with four-year degrees perform similarly to others with four-year degrees, and teachers with graduate studies perform at a comparable level to other adults with graduate studies or degrees. In prose literacy, teachers score higher, on average, than managers and administrators, real estate and food service managers and designers. They perform at a similar level with lawyers, electrical engineers, accountants, and auditors, marketing professionals, financial managers, physicians, personal and training professions, social workers, and education administrators and counselors. Only computer systems analysts scored significantly higher in prose literacy than teachers."

The first study was buried by the Reagan Department of Education, Finn leading the ideologically tinged OERI at the time; the second appeared as How Teachers Compare from the Policy Information Center at Educational Testing Service, February, 1999. The first study produced many other statistics all pointing to the same conclusion: future teachers look like everyone else and there had been no decline in quality of would-be teachers as indicated by grades (the study was commissioned just after that piece of propaganda known as "A Nation At Risk" and was supposed to prove once and for all that people who go into teaching are not very bright. When it didn't show that, it got disappeared). I summarized this study in my December, 1996 Phi Delta Kappan Research column. I happened onto it only from a chance comment by David Imig. When I tracked down the study's director, he said that he had presented the data to the Department of Education and that "the political appointees were not pleased."

Teachers, Gross says, study how to teach, not subject matter. Teachers in private schools don't have to be certified so they study content. Yet, the percentage of high school students who are taught by someone who majored in the subject--English, Social studies, math, science or foreign languages--is higher in public schools than in private except for science. There, 92% of the private kids are taught by science majors compared to a mere 90% in public schools. (Public and Private Schools: How Do They Differ? NCES Report 97-983).

Similarly Gross says the U. S. high school curriculum is "thin"--and his statistics for what percent of American high schoolers have taken various science and math courses come either from the Condition of Education or the report cited above. Yet the same stats for kids in private schools are not much higher.

Whether you think this year is the first of the new millennium, it already gives signs of being a banner year for garbage. And it's a leap year to boot.