Standing up for public education

Many Americans believe they are, and that shouldn't surprise anyone. For the past dozen years, after all, articles and commentaries about failing public schools have dominated newspaper headlines and talk show airwaves.

No American has studied these critiques of public education more closely than Dr. David Berliner of Arizona State University, a past president of the American Educational Research Association. And no American is probably more angered by them, as both a concerned citizen and a scholar.

The reason? The charges that America's schools have failed, says Berliner, are just not true.

"Contrary to the views expressed on radio talk shows and in the press," Berliner told the more than 9,000 delegates in July at NEA's annual Representative Assembly, "the crisis in education created by pointing to the poor academic performance of our nation's youth has no factual basis."

"Make no mistake about it," he added. "This crisis has been manufactured."

Berliner believes that it's time to get tough--because the attacks on public schools have been orchestrated "by people with an agenda that includes the destruction of public education as we know it."

Berliner's forthcoming book, The Manufactured Crisis, will document, in exhaustive detail, the absence of evidence to back up the charges of school failure.

Research by Berliner and other scholars shows that:

* The widely publicized "great drop" in SAT scores is instead a "trivial loss, unrelated either to teaching or the curriculum of schools."

* "Today's students are performing dramatically better than did their parents" on exams such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

* International comparisons, once analyzed carefully, place "many of our states and many of our schools among the highest achieving in the world."

Berliner's book, due out later this fall, ought to spark an intense media self-examination about how American education has been covered over recent years. But "the truth will be heard if, and only if, you force the newspapers and the talk shows to tell it," Berliner told Representative Assembly delegates in New Orleans as he accepted NEA's Friend of Education Award for 1994.

Standing up for the truth actually can make a difference, insists Berliner, who points to one school district where teachers worked very hard to improve instruction for a population of poor and highly mobile kids.

Yet, after several years of work, school-wide state achievement test scores "looked terrible," a fact prominently noted by local newspapers.

But local educators didn't stand around demoralized.

"They disaggregated the test data, and just as they suspected, the average score for the poor kids they had actually taught for two years or more was above the state average," notes Berliner. "They had hard evidence of their success.

The newspapers at first refused to run stories about this new evidence. But local teachers worked with their local Association, school board, and mayor to keep the pressure on. "Eventually," Berliner says, "the newspapers published the truth."

The "truth" about American education in general, Berliner emphasizes, isn't simple. Schools are not failing, but neither are all schools succeeding.

"Even though, in the aggregate, we have a successful system of public education," notes Berliner, "we have many, too many, schools and districts that really are failing."

Failing schools won't succeed, argues Berliner, until America addresses the social problems that deny students a better future.

"Communities where there are no jobs give us children that have no hope," says Berliner.

Schools, meanwhile, also have to change, "because there are now exciting new ideas about teaching and learning But Berliner urges educators to work for change "out of pride, not out of embarassment."

"It's clear from the evidence," Berliner emphasizes, "that, despite having to teach more children with problems, the record of the American public schools is remarkably good."