(I would have done this myself, but I knew that Jeff could do a much better job. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Quick! Who is your go-to expert on American education policy?
In a lot of political arguments, that's frequently the crux of the matter, isn't it? On the economy, you go to Robert Reich or George Will. For the Middle East, Juan Cole or Max Boot.
But when you're looking for opposing sides in the debate on America's public schools, the initial appearance is that, well, there aren't any opposing sides. For sure, there are differences of opinion on specifics that people often argue about with great passion - whether to give out school vouchers so students can attend private schools, whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. But among political leaders in Washington DC and prominent pundits in the MSM, there's a startling uniformity of belief about the state of American education - an over-arching narrative that provides a context that is rarely disputed even when people argue about the merits of year-round schools or whether or not to teach phonics.
For instance, when you look at the education policies that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for in his campaign, you'll find that these are the exact same policies - school accountability based on standardized test scores, merit pay for teachers, charter schools to compete with public schools -- that are being implemented by the Obama administration. And when the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings passed the policy baton to the Obama administration's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, she welcomed him as a "fellow reformer" of what's wrong with US schools.
It seems that when it comes to uniting the polarized discourse of DC, nothing brings adversaries together like education does. What else has ever united The Center for American Progress with the US Chamber of Commerce? Or CAP (again) with the American Enterprise Institute? It's as if education is David Broder's wet dream.
The reason for this is that, for decades, the popular perspective on American education has been dominated, almost exclusively, by a single, simple narrative. Whether you listen to E.J. Dionne or Lou Dobbs, America's schools are "failing." American education is in a "crisis," we've been told again and again. Our students can no longer "compete" against the students of other nations in the race to, um, whatever we're all supposed to be racing toward. Educators themselves are seen as part of the problem. And only the leading business captains or the famed entrepreneur dé jeur - such as Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner - can possible know what to do to fix our "broken" schools.
For years, the most prominent and powerful antidote to this contagion of lock-step thinking has been the writings of Gerald Bracey. Like the impertinent youth who persistently remarked that the emperor had no clothes, Bracey wrote a different story about our schools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what was really true and not true about what was being said about them. In his books, his recurring column in Kappan magazine, and his diaries at HuffingtonPost, he argued persuasively - with actual facts and steel-eyed reason - that the conventional wisdom about our nation's public schools was not only false; it was a cover-up for what is, at the heart, a problem of our democracy.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bracey has left us. And as commenter craigspinks lamented at washingtonpost.com, "Who will take his indispensable place?"
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From Education Week (sub required):
Contrarian Writer Gerald Bracey Dies
"Gerald W. Bracey, a well-known writer, researcher, and advocate for education, died in his sleep Oct. 20 at his home in Port Townsend, Wash., according to his wife, Iris Bracey. He was 69.
Educated at Stanford University and the College of William and Mary, Mr. Bracey specialized in fighting what he saw as the frequent misuse or misreporting of education data by government officials, advocacy groups, and news organizations.
He criticized Republicans and Democrats alike and, for his efforts, won the American Educational Research Association's 'Relating Research to Practice Award' in 2004."
From Kappan magazine (pdf):
"'He really was a national treasure,' said his longtime friend David Berliner, professor of education at Arizona State University. 'He was irascible and he was fearless. He had the energy to go after people, he was really good at digging out the facts, and, fortunately, he was almost always right.'
"Filling the void is going to be really difficult.'"
From USA Today:
"Bracey was mostly known as a pugnacious, sometimes abrasive critic of D.C. education policymakers, lawmakers and the press, decrying what he saw as their historical ignorance, intellectual laziness and chronic lack of skepticism about the latest education reform."
So what was the contrarian Dr. Bracey so critical about, and why will he be so hard to replace? Bracey's passing leaves a huge void in our thinking and dialogue about American education because of the role he played as
* A historian who accurately reframed the story about American schools
* A myth-buster who used facts and reason to correct the conventional discourse about education
* A fervent advocate for improving schools by employing "the social and moral power of the democratic ethic"]
Bracey The Historian: The Sputnick Effect
Like a good historian, Bracey's writings reframe the story of "what's wrong with American schools" to "how and when did the general opinion about US schools begin to change."
He begins with the curiously, dissonant fact that while politicians and the media rarely have anything good to say about public schools, people generally like the local schools their kids go to just fine. He notes:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/nationally-schools-suck-l_b_272939.html "Each year the educational periodical, Phi Delta Kappan, conducts with the Gallup folks a poll of Americans' attitudes towards their public schools. Each year, one result is guaranteed: Respondents say their local schools are OK, but the nation's schools are average to awful."
The fact that parents in suburban school districts think their own schools are fine is so widely known that it comes up frequently in discussions and interviews about education. Yet instead of asking why and how this could be so, supposed thought leaders of education are quick to dismiss it as an inconvenient "tricky political issue." As Chester Finn, the prominent conservative education "thinker" at the Hudson Institute think tank says in [an interview with PBS Frontline, "you don't particularly want to tell people that they're wrong, and that something they think is fine is actually broken." In other words, don't let the actual facts keep me from advancing my agenda.
In contrast, like any good historian, Bracey asks how and when did the general opinion about US schools begin to change? He traces this negative view of the national school system back to what he calls The Sputnick Effect, reminding us of the state of hysteria that the launching of a Russian satellite threw our country into.
"Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson's reaction was typical: 'Soon they'll be dropping bombs on us like kids dropping rocks from a freeway overpass.' As writer Tom Wolfe later described the atmosphere, 'Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil.'"
Then, as we've seen at other points in our nation's history, when the general public is whipped into a frenzy, the American media went looking for someone to blame. And they chose public schools.
"The schools were blamed for letting the Russians orbit the first man-made satellite." Bracey writes. "American media alleged that the forces of evil were greatly assisted by [Russia's] superior schools. Life's five-part series, 'Crisis in Education,' depicted Russian schools as tough, rigorous, and academic while U. S. schools contained mostly easy-going slackers. Other publications echoed Life's sentiments."
Although "most US engineers in the space program in 1957 would have graduated high school in the 1930s, Bracey ironically points out, "in the media, the schools of the 1950s took the hit for Sputnik."
After Sputnick, "Rudolph Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can't Read, Albert Lynd wrote 'Quackery in the Public Schools,' and Arthur Bestor penned his influential Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools, a title that implies that there was an earlier golden era (there wasn't). Bestor's book got him an interview with U. S. News & World Report titled, 'We are less educated than 50 years ago.'
The interview was remarkable mostly for the number of historical errors one would not expect a historian to make (Bestor taught history at the University of Illinois), including not recognizing that 50 years back from the time of the interview would have been 1906 when the high school graduation rate was 7 percent; by 1956 it was above 60 percent. Paul Elicker, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals wrote an extensive rebuttal, but it appeared only in the NASSP Bulletin. U. S. News was not interested.
There were many other reports over the years, but the golden treasury of selected, spun and distorted statistics that lit the current fire in the oh-ain't-it-awful position of the media was 1983's, 'A Nation At Risk.'
Since then it's been non-stop bad mouthing."
To this day, the frantic claims made in "A Nation At Risk" - that American education is in a crisis, that our students are falling behind international competitors - are still being used to browbeat educators and chum the waters of our political discourse. As education blogger Susan Ohanian [http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=294 states:
"Chester E. Finn, summed up his position in a Wall Street Journal article when he angrily wrote: 'You've had your chance. We warned you. We gave you 'Nation At Risk' over twenty years ago. Nothing has changed.'"
As Martin Soloman of ednews.org says, while the right-wing continues to employ the "prevalent trick to repeat, over and over, the same mantra, our public schools are broken, our public schools are not what they could be or our public schools spend too much," the general media continues to lap it up.
Bracey saw clearly what the real narrative arc of the US public school system has been. And it made him the lone voice of clarity in this wilderness of education policy blather.
Bracey The Myth-Buster: Rotten Apples in Education
One feature of Bracey's take-no- prisoner style was his Rotten Apples in Education award, which he bestowed annually to reveal the absurdity of what prominent politicians and pundits were saying about education.
While a biting wit was always part of the Bracey style (he once wrote, "Bill Gates! If you're so rich, why ain't you smart?"), his most admirable talent was his ability to use facts and clear reasoning to destroy the most common myths about education. His diary on "The Nine Myths About Public Schools" at Huffington Post should be required reading for anyone attempting to make an argument about education. Numbers 2 and 3 alone need broad circulation:
"2 Schools alone can close the achievement gap. This is codified in the disaster known as No Child Left Behind. Most of the differences come from family and community variables and many out-of-school factors, especially summer loss. Some studies have found that poor children enter school behind their middle class peers, learn as much during the year and then lose it over the summer. They fall farther and farther behind and schools are blamed. Middle class and affluent kids do not show summer loss.
3. Money doesn't matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates."
Probably the myth that Bracey tore down the most persistently and thoroughly is that American students are "falling behind" the academic achievement of students in other countries. He writes:
"First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It's like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have. On both TIMSS math and science, the U. S. has a much higher proportion of 'advanced' scorers than the international median although the proportion is much smaller than in Asian nations.
Second, test scores, at least average test scores, don't seem to be related to anything important to a national economy. Japan's kids have always done well, but the economy sank into the Pacific in 1990 and has never recovered.
Third, even if comparisons of average test scores were a meaningful exercise, it only looks at one dimension--the supply side. Predictably, the results gave rise to calls for more spending on science instruction. This ignores the fact that we have more scientists and engineers than we can absorb . . . Schools are doing a great job on the supply side. Business and industry are doing a lousy job on the demand side."
Bracey goes after the myth of America's uncompetitive schools so tenaciously because not only is it the very seed of The Sputnick Effect that started the avalanche of criticism of American public education, but also because of what these international comparisons reveal - but is never acknowledged --about what's really wrong with American public education.
Bracey The Advocate: "The Social And Moral Power Of The Democratic Ethic"
Were politicians and pundits to look more thoroughly at what the international comparisons reveal about American education, they would come away with a very different story about what's wrong with our public schools. As Bracey writes in Education Week (sub required):
"International comparisons not only bring forth silly statements about test scores and the economy, they evoke howls of woe and outrage claiming the studies show that the American educational system has failed. . . . U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige greeted the results [of the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA]with 'dismay' . . . When PISA's predecessor, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, appeared, former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Chester E. Finn Jr. took to the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to declare: 'The public school system as we know it has proved that it cannot reform itself. It is an ossified government monopoly that functions largely for the benefit of its employees and interest groups rather than that of children and taxpayers.'
Mr. Paige and Mr. Finn thus missed the singularly important finding of PISA and TIMSS: We don't have a 'public school system as we know it.' We have two. One is for poor and minority students; the other is for the rest of us. Of course, if they had noticed this, they might have been forced to take meaningful action. If Mr. Paige and Mr. Finn had asked, 'How do the scores of the various ethnic groups rank them among the nations in PISA?' they would have seen the answer in this table giving 'Ranks of American Ethnic Groups.' (emphasis mine)
Reading Math Science
White students 2nd 7th 4th
Black students 26/29th 27/30th 27/30th
Hispanic students 26/29th 27/30th 27/30th
It is inequality then -- the achievement gap between ethnicity and between rich and poor -- that is the main target of Bracey's barbs. In his Huffington Post diary on the success of the Harlem Children's Zone created by Geoffrey Canada, he writes of "a truth too long ignored by federal policy makers, by most editors and reporters at the New York Times, and by most schools of education: Public schools are the offspring of the society they serve. Thus public schools reflect both the 'goods' and the 'bads of the society that birthed them."
"No public school teacher administered the poison of poverty to a single poor kid. Others did that, through ignorance, neglect, and avarice. And no teacher can administer the antidote unassisted."
Instead of relying on the old arguments of the so-called "reformers" who insist that public schools are a broken institution that has to be dismantled or shackled with more tests and standards, Bracey calls on our leaders "to replace the tin coin of testing and false standards with the gold coin of the democratic ethic" that poor kids from Harlem can achieve at the same levels of achievement that are normally confined to the more economically privileged white kids.
If we can continue to dole out the massive "largess to corporations," he asks, why can't we "somehow we can't find enough money to drive the rats and termites out of poverty-ridden schools?"
As long as these scandalous conditions persist, what are we to make of slogans like "don't throw money at the schools," "all children can learn," "we must hold all children to high standards," or "no child left behind"? They are hypocritical blather, no more.
Advocates of high standards and high-stakes testing have described them as engines for social justice. They are instead infernal machines of social destruction, exacerbating the achievement gap between rich and poor."
Rather than falsehoods about our country's "bad" school system, the myths about how poorly our children are being educated, and the inflated potentials of charters, merit pay, and testing, testing, testing, it is this "social and moral power of the democratic ethic," which Bracey talks about, that should be driving this nation's current education debate. And right now, it isn't. Instead, advocates of high standards and high-stakes testing describe their policies as engines for social justice - all the while continuing to deny a quality education to every kid.
Truly, Gerald Bracey's presence will be missed.
As Sylvia writes at Generation Yes blog, "Dr. Gerald Bracey can rest in peace - the rest of us need to get busy . . . [He] created a legacy that must not fade away. Those of us left must take up the mantle, stand on his shoulders, and continue the work." |
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