Reposted with the permission of the American Federation of Teachers
http://www.aft.org
Where We Stand
by Albert Shanker
Debunking the Debunkers
What if the problem with student achievement that we spend so much time 
talking and worrying about were simply a myth?  And what if this myth had 
been concocted and was being spread by conservatives who want to destroy 
public education? These are claims put forward by David Berliner and Bruce 
Biddle in _The Manufactured Crisis_, (Addison-Wesley, 1995). Combining good 
news with a conspiracy theory makes for compelling reading, but the authors 
are able to sustain their thesis only by ignoring or distorting evidence 
that doesn't fit. Lawrence Stedman, a researcher and teacher at the State 
University of New York-Binghamton, demonstrates this in a couple of careful 
discussions that appear in _Educational Policy Analysis Archives_, a 
scholarly electronic journal.
     Stedman agrees with Berliner and Biddle that the alleged decline in 
U.S. education--often explained by the excesses of the 1960s--never 
happened. Student achievement, he says, has remained largely unchanged in 
the past 30 years.  But, of course, we may have to do more than stand 
still. Take the U.S. auto industry. What was good enough to make our cars 
tops in the world in the 1950s was no longer good enough in the 1980s. The 
auto industry had to make big changes in order to recover ground from the 
Japanese.  American education is in a similar situation.
     How, otherwise, do we explain the fact that over 25 percent of high 
school seniors taking the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress 
(NAEP) reading test could not read at what is considered to be a basic 
level or that 50 percent failed to achieve at a basic level in history? 
This means, as Stedman points out, that less than half of seniors knew such 
things as the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine or that the main aim of U.S. 
foreign policy during the Cold War was to prevent the spread of communism.
     Student achievement in math is equally dismal. NAEP's own analysis of 
exams administered in the early 1990s shows that fewer than half of high 
school seniors "appeared to have a firm grasp of seventh-grade content." 
Most students are competent at basic procedures such as adding whole 
numbers or reading line graphs, but many stumble when it comes to even 
simple problems involving fractions, decimals, and percents. 
     It is not that NAEP questions are difficult--or irrelevant. The 
history NAEP asks for the kind of information we would expect citizens to 
know. And if students cannot do seventh-grade math--a minimum for most 
jobs--it makes little difference that our test scores are still as good as 
they were 30 years ago.
     Berliner and Biddle attempt to bolster their contention that the 
education crisis is all on paper by looking at international comparisons. 
Are U.S. students at the bottom, as we often hear?  Not at all, according 
to Berliner and Biddle. In fact, they are at the top--or, if they are not, 
it is because they are being compared with elite groups of students from 
other countries or tested on material that they have not covered in school. 
Stedman agrees with them that U.S. students do well in reading and 
elementary school science, but he points out that Berliner and Biddle can 
support these conclusions for high school science and math only by 
extremely selective use of the evidence.
     Take the second international IEA math study, for example. Many 
countries had enrollment rates in math for 12th graders that were similar 
to ours, and most of these countries outperformed the U.S. In some cases, 
countries with higher enrollment rates performed better than the U.S. 
Hungary, for example, which enrolled about half of its 12th graders in 
math, scored about the same as the U.S., which enrolled only 13 percent. In 
the second international science study in the mid 1980s, the U.S. actually 
had more selective 12th-grade course enrollments than most countries and 
still achieved more poorly in chemistry, physics, and biology. 
     _The Manufactured Crisis_ has been warmly received by educators all 
over the country. No wonder. They are human, too, and they are tired of 
hearing bad news about public education. But, as Stedman shows, they are 
just kidding themselves if they go along with Berliner and Biddle's 
insistence that our biggest problem is thinking that we have a problem. 
Stedman does not find much evidence for the conspiracy theory, either. It 
is true that people who want to privatize public education, perhaps by 
introducing vouchers, are exploiting the difficulties with student 
achievement. But the fact that  conservatives exploit these problems is no 
evidence that conservatives have manufactured them. Neither do problems 
with achievement lead inexorably to vouchers. When conservatives point to 
the high levels of achievement in other countries, they never mention that 
none of these countries use vouchers.  Why don't we try instead to emulate 
their successful public school systems?
Lawrence Stedman's two critiques of _The Manufactured Crisis_ and David 
Berliner and Bruce Biddle's rejoinder can be accessed in Volume 4 of 
_Educational Policy Analysis Archives_. 
The address on the World Wide Web is: http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/epaa/
Chuck Beams
cbeams@dreamscape.com
http://www.dreamscape.com/cbeams
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