Reply #5: ...the long-standing campaign to persuade the American people that public education has failed.

[Hannah Bell]

This has been a disinformation campaign based on fraudulent claims, distortions, and outright lies.

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, there have been numerous reports issued, each declaring U.S. public education a disaster, and each proposing "solutions" to our problems. The sponsors of the many reports are a little like the con-man in "The Music Man," who declares, "We've got trouble, right here in River City..." and the chorus repeats, "trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..."

He just happens to be selling the solution to all their troubles. How do you sell radical changes that would have been completely unacceptable to the public a decade or two ago? You tell people over and over that their institutions have failed, and that only the solutions you are peddling offer any way out of their "troubles..."

But let's look just briefly at a couple of the key pieces of disinformation to which the American public has been subjected.

The supposed dramatic decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores was a fraud. These scores did decline somewhat over the period 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test. It is not representative of anything, and it is useless as a measure of student performance or of the quality of the schools. The scores began to fall modestly when the range of young people going into college dramatically expanded in the mid-sixties.

Did this mean that there was a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. During the period in question, PSAT scores held absolutely steady.

Even more notable is the fact that scores on the College Board Achievement Tests--which test students not on some vaguely-defined "aptitude," but on what they know of specific subjects-did not fall but ROSE SLIGHTELY BUT CONSISTENTLY OVER THE SAME PERIOD IN WHICH FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF BLACK AND WHITE WORKING FAMILIES WERE ENTERING COLLEGE IN MASSIVE NUMBERS.

Berliner and Biddle comment in their book, The Manufactured Crisis, "the real evidence indicates that the myth of achievement decline is not only false-it is a hysterical fraud."

How different would have been the public's understanding of what was happening in the schools if the media and the politicians had told the truth! How different if they had announced that, during the period of the greatest turmoil in American society since the Civil War, in which a higher proportion of young people were graduating high school and going on to college than ever before, at a rate unparalleled in any other country in the world, representative tests showed that overall aptitude and achievement were holding steady or increasing? How different would have been the history of these last decades for educators and parents and students-and for public education?

What about the claim that U.S. business has lost its competitive edge because of the alleged failure of public education? Anyone who has been watching the triumphal progress of American corporations in the world market in the last two decades or has watched the unprecedented returns on the stock market knows that these claims are preposterous. Let me cite a few specific facts here:


-U.S. workers are the most productive in the world. Workers in Japan and Germany are only 80% as productive; in France, 76% as productive; in the United Kingdom, 61% as productive.


-America leads the world in the percentage of its college graduates who obtain degrees in science or engineering, and this percentage has been steadily rising since 1971.


-Far from having a shortage of trained personnel, there is now in fact a glut of scientists and engineers in the U.S. The Boston Globe reported on 3/17/97 that , "At a time when overall unemployment has fallen to around 5%, high-level scientists have been experiencing double-digit unemployment." The government estimates that America will have a surplus of over 1 million scientists and engineers by 2010, even if the present rate of production does not increase.


What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education?

To understand this, I believe we have to look beyond education to developments in the economy and the wider society. In the past decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Millions more have been lost to "restructuring" and "downsizing." This trend is not likely to abate. The U. S. is presently enjoying its lowest official unemployment rate in decades-4.9%, or about 6.2 million unemployed at the peak of a long period of sustained growth. But even this large figure is deceptive, because it does not include the millions of people who have been reduced to temporary or part-time work, without benefits, without job security, and without hope of advancement. The number of "contingent" workers in 1993 was over 34 million.

The future for employment is even more grim. Computerization will eliminate millions of jobs and deskill millions more. This is, after all, the attraction of automation for corporations: it downgrades the skills required of most jobs, and thereby makes employees cheaper and more easily expendable...

Now, what does all this have to do with education?

"....Ask yourself, What would happen if the public schools really succeeded?" What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well?

In an economy with over 6 million unemployed by official count, in which millions more are underemployed or working part-time or in temporary jobs, in which many millions of jobs are being deskilled by computerization and many millions eliminated, and in which wages have fallen to 1958 levels, where would these successful graduates go? What would they do?

If they had all graduated with As and Bs, they would have high expectations-expectations for satisfying jobs which would use their talents. Expectations for further education. Expectations about their right to participate in society and to have a real voice in its direction.

I think you can see that, for the people at the very top of this society, who have been instrumental in shipping jobs overseas and restructuring the workforce and downsizing the corporations and shifting the tax burden from the rich onto middle-class and working Americans-the class of people, in short, who have been planning and reaping the benefits of the restructuring of American society-for this class of people at the top, for the schools to succeed would be very dangerous indeed.

How much better that the schools not succeed, so that, when young people end up with a boring or low-paying or insecure job or no job at all, they say, "I have only myself to blame." How much better that they blame themselves instead of the economic system.

THE REASON THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION IS UNDER ATTACK IS THIS:

OUR YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE MORE TALENT AND INTELLIGENCE AND ABILITY THAN THE CORPORATE SYSTEM CAN EVER USE, AND HIGHER DREAMS AND ASPIRATIONS THAN IT CAN EVER FULFILL.

TO FORCE YOUNG PEOPLE TO ACCEPT LESS FULFILLING LIVES IN A MORE UNEQUAL, LESS DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY,
THE EXPECTATIONS AND SELF-CONFIDENCE OF MILLIONS OF THEM MUST BE DOWNSIZED AND THEIR SENSE OF THEMSELVES RESTRUCTURED TO FIT THE NEW CORPORATE ORDER, IN WHICH A RELATIVE FEW REAP THE REWARDS OF CORPORATE SUCCESS -- DEFINED IN TERMS OF HUGE SALARIES AND INCREDIBLE STOCK OPTIONS -- AND THE MANY LEAD DIMINISHED LIVES OF POVERTY AND INSECURITY.

http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/edspeech.htm