Reply #10: Defending the conclusions in their book The Manufactured Crisis. [View All]

[ipaint]

"We began our book by noting that throughout most of the Reagan and Bush years, the White House led an unprecedented and energetic attack on America's public schools, making extravagant and false claims about the supposed failures of those schools, and arguing that those claims were backed by "evidence." To illustrate, in 1983 the White House released a widely-touted brochure, "A Nation at Risk," claiming (among other things) that the "average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched." This claim made an assertion about factual matters, but somehow no evidence was cited in "A Nation at Risk" to support it, nor could any have been given since it was false.

Again, in 1989 John Sununu was to claim that Americans "spend twice as much as the Japanese and almost 40 percent more than all the other major industrialized countries of the world," and George Bush (the "Education President") was to intone that our nation "lavishes unsurpassed resources on schooling." These claims were equally untrue. Other damaging claims made by the White House during these years argued: that American schools "always" look bad in international comparisons of achievements; that educational expenditures are not related to school achievements and that additional investments in education are "wasted"; that because of inadequacies in our schools, American industrial workers are non- productive; and that the typical private school out-achieves the typical public school when dealing with similar students. These and other false claims, designed to weaken Americans' confidence in their public schools, were all said to be backed by "evidence," although somehow the "evidence" in question was often only hinted at.

This attack was led by specific persons--whom we named in our book--and created myths about education that were sometimes backed by no evidence at all, sometimes supported by misleading analyses of inappropriate data, and sometimes aided by the deliberate suppression of contradicting information. No such White House attack on public education had ever before appeared in American history--indeed, even in the depths of the Nixon years the White House had not told such lies about our schools. Since the attack was well organized and was led by such powerful persons--and since its charges were shortly to be echoed in other broadsides by leading industrialists and media pundits--its false claims have been accepted by many, many Americans. And these falsehoods have since generated a host of poor policy decisions that have damaged the lives of hard-working educators and innocent students."

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n3.html