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AROUND THE WEB
Washington Post
May 4, 2002
Gerald Bracey
There's no pleasing some people, even when they get what they want. So why do we keep listening to them?
For almost 20 years now...prominent business leaders and politicians have sounded the same alarm about the nation's public schools. It began with the 1983 golden treasury of selected, spun and distorted education statistics, "A Nation At Risk," whose authors wrote, "If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system..." The document tightly yoked our economic position in the world to how well or poorly students bubbled in answer sheets on standardized tests...
...So you might think that these Chicken Littles would be firing up their fax machines and e-mailing everywhere to report the following hot news from the World Economic Forum's "Global Competitiveness Report, 2001-2002": The United States ranks second in the organization's Current Competitiveness Index, trailing only Finland...
...But the naysayers haven't trumpeted the CCI ranking...Schools often take the hit for bad turns of events, but somehow never get the credit for upturns...In 1969, America put a man on the moon, a destination that the Russians -- with their allegedly superior scientists -- never reached. Did a magazine declare an end to the "crisis" in education? Do pigs fly?
...I've been following the angst over our competitive capabilities since the 1983 report, and I've noticed the same pattern. In the early 1990s, as the economy tanked and a recession set in, many variations of "lousy - schools -are - producing - a - lousy - workforce -and - it's - killing - us - in - the - global - marketplace" could be heard. But these slackers somehow managed to turn things around: By early 1994, many publications featured banner headlines about the recovery that later became the longest sustained period of growth in the nation's history...
Well, if the schools took the rap when the economy went south, surely they would be praised when the economy boomed, right? Hardly. A mere three months after the Times story appeared, IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner Jr., wrote an op-ed for for the Times headlined "Our Schools Are Failing." They are failing, said Gerstner, because they are not producing students who can compete with their international peers.
The bashers have kept up their drumbeat. Intel CEO Craig R. Barrett, Texas Instruments CEO Thomas Engibous, State Farm Insurance CEO Edward Rust and then-Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson all took to the nation's op-ed pages in 2000 and 2001 to lament the threat that our education system poses to our competitiveness...
...None of these fine gentlemen provided any data on the relationship between the economy's health and the performance of schools. Our long economic boom suggests there isn't one -- or that our schools are better than the critics claim. ..
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