Caveat lector

FOOLED ON SCHOOLS! A bracing report in the Washington Post gives the lie to twenty years of school bashing:

TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2003

SCHOOLS RULE: For a must-read piece from the Post op-ed page, see Gerald Bracey’s April 25 report, “20 Years of School Bashing.” As readers know, our pundit corps loves to attack American public schools—sometimes with a political agenda, and sometimes from sheer dumb-ass cussedness. Bracey’s piece reminds all readers to be careful of such school-bashing work.

Are America’s schools an international joke? Are American students the dumbest around? We get this impression from press corps rants. But in one part of Bracey’s piece, he discusses a 35-nation study whose results were released just this month:

BRACEY: Blaming public schools for social ills has a long and dishonorable history…Yet in the international reading study released this month (and ignored by most media), American students finished ninth among 35 nations. White American students outscored top-ranked Sweden 565 to 561. Americans attending schools with less than 10 percent of the students in poverty (13 percent of all students) scored a whopping 589, and only those attending schools with more than 75 percent of the students in poverty (20 percent of all students) scored below the international average.

Meanwhile, most of Bracey’s report is an attack on “A Nation At Risk”—the iconic study of American schools which is twenty years old this very month. The study “restored to popularity the sport of pummeling the public schools,” Bracey notes—and he says that the hoary old report was “a grand April Fools’ joke.” How bad was it? “One must admire the sheer audacity of the commissioners for writing such hokum,” Bracey writes. “But this snake oil served school critics well when they blamed our ‘lousy’ schools for the recession of the 1980s.” What was wrong with “A Nation at Risk?” We advise you to read Bracey’s piece.

Here at THE HOWLER, we’ve never studied “A Nation at Risk.” We can’t vouch for Bracey’s analysis. And guess what? No one else will ever debate his assertions. As you know, our press corps loves its Official Approved Tales, and the claim that American public schools really stink is a long-standing, much-treasured old chestnut. But readers, remember the scores from that 35-nation study the next time you hear that our schools are dead-end. We’ve advised you before to be very careful when you see test scores from “international studies.” Bracey’s bracing breath of fresh air reminds us to be skeptics again.

DON’T EVEN START: Don’t even start with your complaints that it’s “racist” to leave out our black kids. The point here is simple—American history has created a situation that exists in no other developed nation. Japan and Sweden didn’t spend hundreds of years destroying literacy among ten percent of their populations. The astounding tragedy of American history created the tragedy of today’s urban schools. At present, American ed is indeed overwhelmed by the problems that exist in our urban schools. But other countries don’t face the unique problem that our history has asked us to handle.

As readers may know, our entire staff spent their first twelve adult years teaching lovely kids in Baltimore’s city schools. Those kids deserve to have the truth told—not only about how bad their schools are, but about schools in other parts of their country. Meanwhile, for an utterly worthless Post op-ed education piece, just read this, by a regular columnist. If we served tapioca this bland in our schools, outraged kids would stage instant food riots.

The Daily update

THE LYON THAT ROARED: When the Washington Times reported the results of the 35-nation study, reporter George Archibald included these silly remarks from "Bush's top reading adviser:"

ARCHIBALD (4/9/03): G. Reid Lyon, President Bush’s top reading adviser at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said the study disappointingly shows no change in the level of reading achievement of American students from two prior studies during the past decade.

What silly remarks! Only a fool would assume that the U.S. should have improved its international rank over that achieved in other recent studies. After all, other nations are trying to improve their school systems too—and attempts at “reform” which we’ve seen in this country have seen silly, political, phantasmagoric, charade-dominant. But when Lyon considered our test scores by race, he did say something that was tragically accurate:

ARCHIBALD: “If you disaggregate the data in this PIRLS report, you will still see substantial gaps in performance in the [United] States between racial and ethnic groups and between kids from low-income families and more advantaged families,” he said. “And what that tells us is that we have a long way to go.”