0n December 2, 1996, Newsweek magazine published a story entitled “The Sum of Mediocrity,” saying that it is “Time for another global-competitiveness alert. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study — which last year tested a half a million students in 41 countries — American eighth graders scored below the world average in math. And that’s not even the worst part. Consider this as you try to figure out which countries will dominate the technology markets of the 21st Century: the top 10 percent of America’s math student’s scored about the same as the average kid in the global leader, Singapore.”
So, once again we continue to have yet another salvo in the continuing barrage of reporting in the American print (and, of course, the visual) media bashing the American system of public schooling. All this despite a growing amount of evidence marshaled by people such as Gerald Bracey, one of this country’s most respected educational researchers, writing in the profession’s foremost journal, Phi Delta Kappan, and in such books as “The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America’s Public Schools” by David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle (Addison-Wesley), that test scores in general are actually at an all-time high (including the SAT’s and the College Boards when one takes into account the vastly larger number of students taking the tests), that very few schools are cesspools of gang violence, with most of those being inner city schools suffering from Jonathan Kozol’s “savage inequalities,” that U.S. students actually rank high on almost all international tests of both math and science, that there is no evidence of any link between the educational performance of American students and the health of the economy and that, indeed, American economic productivity leads all other nations, with the U.S. economy being the most competitive in the world.
Now, as Bracey, Berliner, Biddle and others have often pointed out, any examination of the public’s opinion about our American system of public education must, of course, include an assessment of the quality of the media coverage of that system, since the quality of the public’s perceptions of its schools is so clearly shaped by what and how the media chooses to report. Indeed, many of the policy decisions that are made by national, state and local decision-makers are all too often based upon little more than the media’s reporting of what those public perceptions appear to be.
I bring up these unpleasant facts in a spirit of deep humility. When I was an education reporter before becoming a Nieman Fellow in 1959, I was as guilty as any reporter of being largely ignorant of what I was talking about. I was all too easily taken in by the rampant rhetoric that was the daily staple of education reporting in those Cold War days. The great educational myth of that time immediately before and after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in 1958 was that the American public schools were desperately inferior to the Russian schools, especially in science and math, that this was the reason we as a nation were “behind” the Russians in sophisticated rocketry and that the schools were therefore actually causing us to lose the Cold War itself.
None of this, of course, turned out to be the case. But we in the media — and therefore most Americans — bought into this great myth, with the result that a era of large-scale “curriculum and school reform” was launched with considerable fanfare and large amounts of federal and foundation dollars. It was along about here that I stopped being a newspaperman and switched over to the other side, i.e., the side of the working stiffs in the public schools. I did this because I realized that I was temperamentally better suited to being involved in attempting to improve the schools rather than the equally important task of reporting on the facts of the case. I first became an educational foundation program officer, then the director of an elementary school social studies curriculum program, then the director of research, development and experimental schools in the Boston public schools, then a general school consultant specializing in desegregation plans, magnet schools, parent and professional choice and eventually (as of now) an advocate of a new, entirely reconceived system of American public schooling.
Thus, nothing that Bracey, Berliner or Biddle say or my referring to them here should be taken to mean that I think that the public schools of this nation are doing the best job they could possibly do. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere and will argue here that the job we have been asking our public schools to do for the last 100 years is a task that no longer serves any realistic purpose, if it ever did. It has been and still is a task that has little relevance to what we now know about how human beings go about the task of learning anything at all, and it has virtually no relevance to what the coming century will be requiring of us either as a nation or, for that matter, as members of a still-evolving biological species that hopes to continue to survive and prosper.
But just as that Sputnik-generated hysteria turned out to be a fraud and its “curriculum reform” movement turned out to achieve only the slightest improvement in the schooling of children and young people, so today we are in the grip of a similarly ill-founded and equally misdirected “school reform” movement. This time around it is not a manned rocket launched by the Russians that is causing us to flog the public schools, but a government report that claimed, in the best tradition of the Business Week cover story criticized by Bracey, that the public schools are failing miserably to do the job they are there to do.
That report was called “A Nation at Risk” and was issued by the then U.S. Office of Education in 1983. The report was the result of the work of a National Commission on Excellence in Education, consisting primarily of college or university presidents, university professors, business executives, state education officials and one lone teacher.
The commission did not begin its work with a discussion and explanation of its methods for defining and then recognizing “educational excellence.” Nor did the commission members spend many hours, days and weeks immersing themselves in the daily routines of real schools inhabited by real students and practicing school people, listening carefully to what they had to say, living the lives they are compelled to live and finding out firsthand what those people believe the real problems of public education in this country to be. Rather, they relied entirely on indirect, second and third-hand sources of information: a series of 53 papers commissioned by the Commission itself produced by academic research experts in colleges and universities and policy research centers; the staffs analysis of already existing academic research on “problems in education;” on “testimony” gathered during special Commission hearings from “administrators, teachers, students, representatives of professional and public groups, parents, business leaders, public officials and scholars.”
After roughly 18 months of such study and report-writing, the commission and its staff issued its “A Nation at Risk” report. This is the famous (or perhaps more accurately infamous) report that said the public schools were “awash in a tide of mediocrity” and were a manifest threat to the economic well-being of the nation. It outlined 14 “dimensions of the risk before us” that “have been amply documented by the testimony received by the commission,” and they thus proceeded inadvertently to spell out not only their definition of “educational excellence” but their method of judging it. This turned out to be almost solely a judgment made on the basis of scores achieved by United States and foreign students on national and international standardized academic achievement tests in all of the standard curricular subjects, and especially scores on tests of reading, mathematics and science and on the SAT and College Board examination results.
The publication of this report and the widespread play that it received in every possible form of the print and visual media sparked what has become the most influential educational reform movement of the 1990’s. This is the Clinton administration’s much touted “Goals 2000” movement for “higher,” indeed “world class” academic standards, a “voluntary” national curriculum and “voluntary” national academic tests.
In the “Nation at Risk” (as well as in the present) case, of course, there is a great deal of rhetoric about students fulfilling their individual potential and having the necessary skills to become productive members of society and good workers in the global economy. But when we come to both the 1983 and the new 1990’s recommendations for improving the schools, we get essentially the following basic prescriptions: that all schools adopt those rigorous “world class” academic standards and require that all students take four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of science, three years of social studies and one half-year of computer science, along with other less basic things such as a foreign language, fine and performing arts and vocational education; that schools, colleges and universities adopt more rigorous and measurable standards and higher expectations for academic performance and student conduct; that four-year colleges and universities raise their requirements for admission; and that significantly more time be devoted to academic studies, thus requiring more effective use of the existing school day, a longer school day, or a lengthened school year.
While a few of the recommendations were not solely concerned with laying down the law from on high and “getting tough” with students and teachers in order to raise academic achievement and test scores in the conventional academic subjects and disciplines, the main thrust of the recommendations is clear. The answer to what ails the American system of public education is not more money or a greater share of national resources put into the public system to repair Kozol’s savage inequalities, or a radical devolution of power down to people actually working in the schools.
No, what both the “Nation at Risk” report and the Goals 2000 program have given us is a national education agenda that is little more than an oldfashioned, authoritarian tightening of the control over what goes on in the schools by the federal, state and local authorities who control the educational policies and the educational purse strings, with the people in the schools left essentially powerless and unassisted. The message to everyone out in the schools is simple and unambiguous: “Pull up your socks! Work harder, keep your noses to the grindstone, do more teacher and student homework, get better scores on those tests. But don’t expect much, if any, additional funding, more and better materials or decent school facilities. And above all, don’t expect to be given more autonomy, more authority to do what you think is best for your students. Do, instead, what we say you should do. Meet the ’standards’ we determine you should meet whether you agree with them or not.”
It is this totally negative “Nation at Risk”/Goals 2000 assessment of the public schools and the resulting punitive and unrealistic educational agenda that lies behind the Newsweek story cited above and that therefore lies behind much of the educational coverage that has appeared in virtually every newspaper and on every TV station in the land over the past 15 years.
So here we have once again a classic example of the misuse of social science research in the field of education and especially the misunderstanding and therefore the misuse of the results of psychometric standardized academic testing by the non-educational world, very much including the national and local print and visual media. Which is most unfortunate, since such misrepresentation and misuse not only misleads the American public about the nature and quality of its public schools but also gives all social science research an undeservedly bad image.
While it is true that this misapplication of social science research and psychometric testing has been one of the great scandals of public schooling for many decades now, the IQ and standardized academic achievement tests have on many occasions been properly used to rescue from unjustified educational oblivion children who have been unfairly labeled as failures by the educational system itself. Of equal importance, much social science research — such as the research on cognitive and human development — has been in the past and will continue to be absolutely crucial to the creation of new and better ways of educating children and young people. And it must also be pointed out that it is our more responsible social scientists and psychometricians themselves who constantly attempt to educate people both to the legitimate uses and to the limitations of such testing.
No, the great and continuing malfeasance here, as this offense is starkly born out in the “Nation At Risk” fiasco, is that these psychometric research data are uniformly used by both the educational and non-educational worlds — and therefore most perniciously by the national visual and print media and by the chief executive officers of our big industrial corporations — as virtually the only method of defining and then rendering judgment upon the quality of the education offered in this country’s public schools. The word “virtually” appears here because there is one other widely used and quite related criterion: the number of high school graduates accepted into the colleges and universities, and most especially our prestigious four-year Ivy League colleges and universities, including our beloved Harvard, and their public equivalents. This is, of course, a number that obviously still has a great deal to do with student success on those standardized academic achievement tests and especially the SAT’s and the College Boards.
Thus whenever the question of educational “quality” — or in the “Nation At Risk” case educational “excellence” — is raised, we do not find ourselves talking about the overall growth and development of our children and young people as thinking, feeling , caring human beings, as thoughtful and responsible future citizens of a possibly more just and humane democratic society. Rather, we find ourselves defining the question of educational quality and rendering judgment solely in terms of the numerical scores on those standardized academic achievement tests.
What we all need constantly to remember and understand here, of course, is that by their very design and purpose these psychometric tests are arbitrary, decontextualized, depersonalized sets of mathematical figures, charts and graphs. Students and teachers disappear as flesh and blood livers of lives. And equally deceptive and misleading, of course, is the fact that such tests do not take into consideration the all-too-often appalling conditions under which our teachers and students are expected to function, with this being especially true of those teachers and students in our desperately underfunded and decaying urban schools.
This misuse of these psychometric data, however, has effects that go well beyond their use as the sole measure of educational quality. As many social scientists have pointed out, these tests and their results suffer from two further unfortunate defects.
The first of these is that the tests inevitably reflect and reinforce our educational system’s builtin, systemic bias against poor and minority children of every color and stripe. Social scientists who have studied the matter have made it clear that the best predictors of success in conventional schooling and high scores on the standardized tests as well as admission into and success in our colleges or universities are the race or ethnic group, the social and economic class and the educational level of one’s parents. And in this society, despite all of the cant about the creation of a meritocratic “level playing field, ” of “equal educational opportunity” for all children and making sure that “every child is achieving his or her full potential,” this still means that those who succeed and prosper in our American system of education — public and private, higher and lower — are the white (and now Asian), relatively well-off, largely suburban, already reasonably well-educated and largely non-immigrant portion of the American population.
The second of these psychometric faults is that, while no one disputes the importance of teaching children to read and to do mathematics, the standardized reading and math tests give us information about only two — the verbal and logico-mathematical — of the eight “multiple” intelligences proposed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner as existing to greater or lesser degree in every child and young person. The other six intelligences (and ways of succeeding out in the real world) —the visual, musical, kinetic, social, personal and naturalistic — are completely ignored, as are the children and young people who may excel in those pursuits.
The unfortunate results of this misuse of standardized test results in reading and math as the sole means of judging the quality of our public schools and the quality of the students in those public schools are most dramatically displayed in the sacred ritual staged each year throughout the nation in every school system, every local newspaper, every local television station and then, of course, in all of the national print and visual media. This is the annual compilation and publication of the standardized reading and math test scores of the children in each of the nation’s public schools and school systems. On the narrow basis of these test scores, schools are rated, teachers and principals are excoriated and threatened with job loss if the results are low, both the present and future lives of our children and young people are relentlessly determined and the public’s belief in and support — or lack of support — of its public schools are established.
Very few local newspapers, local TV stations and even their national counterparts appear to have the in-house capacity, just as we did not have the capacity in my olden days, to carefully analyze the results of this annual ritual before they pass those results on to an innocent and unsuspecting public. They appear not to have reporters and editors capable of breaking those figures down and looking behind them to find out what the racial, ethnic, social and economic make-up of every school’s student body is and then making sure that the raw numerical results of the tests are tempered in their reporting with careful explanations of what those scores really mean.
In my many years of experience working with school systems all across the country, I have always made a point of avidly following the educational coverage of the local newspapers and TV stations (as well as the national media), if only to maintain my ties to the world’s second oldest profession. But I have only rarely seen the kind of perceptive test score reporting and analysis the public really needs.
Let me briefly describe two ways our newspapers and television stations could and should be going about the annual ritual of the reporting of test scores in order to better inform the public about what is going on in its schools, i.e., the kind of questions that they should be asking and the kind of comparisons they should be making before they unleash the test results on the public.
The first responsibility here is to insist that the reading and math scores for each school be accompanied by a careful breakdown of each school’s student population on the bases of race, ethnic group and socioeconomic status so that those schools primarily educating poor and minority students are identified and the public is made aware of the challenges those schools are facing as a result of the difficulties many of their students are experiencing in an inherently unfair American society and an equally unfair educational world.
Secondly, the scores should also be accompanied by a random sampling of the high and low test score schools describing firsthand the conditions under which the schools are operating — the state of the school facilities, the class sizes, the provision of educational supplies and materials (including not only books and a real library but paper, pencils and the most up-to-date computer technologies), the professional preparation and experience of the school staff, the amount of money per pupil spent in each school, whether the school has adequate facilities and teachers providing good experiences not only in the sciences but in all of the visual and performing arts and physical sports, and whether the school is adequately supplied with social and educational support services for all children and young people experiencing real social and economic difficulties (again with urban/suburban comparisons).
The scores should also then be minimally prefaced by a careful discussion of the inherent limitations and pitfalls of all such psychometric testing, so that the public has at the very least been supplied with all of the information necessary to interpret the scores in a minimally honest and accurate fashion.
I do not mean in any way to imply here — as I pointed out earlier — that the local and national media should thus simply become unreflective supporters of what is going on in our American system of public education. There are a great many things wrong with the public schools, and these need to be widely reported and discussed. However — and very much in addition to the accurate and fair reportage of test results — what the beleaguered people in our public schools need from their local and national media is, first, the help of people who understand what real life is like in our desperately underfunded and often very dangerous public schools. They then need the help of people who are able to respect the wisdom those school people as working stiffs have derived from their everyday experience in those schools. They then need people who are able to respect the ideas they as practicing teachers have about improving public schooling, people who will report on and even help them develop and implement the good and interesting ideas the school people have about how better to conduct the enterprise of teaching and learning under the difficult conditions of real life in those schools.
Which also means that what the people in the schools need is beatpounders who not only understand what all of the psychometric test results can legitimately say about the quality of education in those schools, but who also can then communicate what they see, feel and know so that the great American public can judge for itself whether their public schools are doing what they should be doing and serving the nation well.
If we all — school people, local and national policymakers and everyone in the print and visual media — cannot manage this level of honest concern and careful attention, then both the public schools of this country and the nation itself truly are at risk.