By any reasonable standard, our students are performing poorly.
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 be 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 is: http:/ /seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/epaa/