Is U.S. Education Better Than Ever?

In a recent item on Huffington Post, Gerald Bracey claimed that I should atone for having "suppressed" the Sandia report in 1991. Bracey has achieved a certain notoriety for his insistence over many years that American schools today are better than ever and that anyone who dares to criticize them is wrong, misguided, and/or part of an evil cabal to destroy public education.

Now what was the Sandia report and why does it matter? And how did I allegedly conspire to "suppress" it?

In 1991, I became Assistant Secretary of Research in the U.S. Department of Education. About six weeks after I took office, I heard that the U.S. Department of Energy had received a report about the state of American education written by some engineers at one of its nuclear weapons facilities -- the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. This report claimed, as I recall, that there was no crisis in American education, that the scores were really not falling, that the only problem was the low scores of minority students, and that the rest of the education system was doing fine. Just take out the scores of black and Hispanic and inner-city kids, they suggested, and the picture was rosy.

To begin with, I don't know why the Department of Energy was getting a report on American education. Nor do I know why it was written by people who normally were involved in testing nuclear weapons systems. But I do recall that it seemed absurd to delete the performance of black and Hispanic kids from any judgment about the state of education, because they, too, are part of our society and they, too, must be educated.

The professional staff at the U.S. Department of Energy thought that the report was unsound and referred it to the U.S. Department of Education. That placed it in my bailiwick, since I was in charge of the Office of Research. The Sandia report, as it was called, was evaluated by the top professional research staff. I played no role in the evaluation. They concluded that the use of data was inadequate and unprofessional. Their findings were transmitted to the U.S. Department of Energy.

When the Energy Department decided not to publish the report, the Sandia engineers appealed to key Republican Senator Pete Dominici of New Mexico. He convened a meeting and invited half a dozen other senior Republican senators. I attended that meeting with Deputy Secretary David T. Kearns. David Kearns, the former CEO of the Xerox Corporation, had joined the U.S. Department of Education a few months earlier.

The Sandia engineers summarized their reports and did a slide show of international test data. According to Gerald Bracey, David Kearns threatened the engineers and said something like "you bury that report or we'll bury you." Bracey says that I denied that Kearns ever made such a threat.

This is the one point on which I agree with Bracey. I deny that Kearns ever made such a threat. Kearns did not crudely threaten to "bury" the engineers from the Sandia National Laboratories. For one thing, I was there and Bracey was not.

For another, David Kearns is probably the most civil person I have ever met. In my year of working closely with him, I never heard him threaten anyone, in private or in public. All of us could take lessons in decency and civility from David Kearns.

Furthermore, David Kearns knew, as did all the senators in that room, that there is no way that a report, an opinion, an essay, or any other expression of one's views can be suppressed. The decision of the U.S. Department of Energy not to publish was based on evaluations of its quality by professional staff at the Departments of Energy and Education. The ultimate decision was made by the Department of Energy, since the Sandia Lab was part of their network.

The report was not published by the federal government, but it certainly was not suppressed. It was published in a research journal, as Bracey notes, and it received very wide publicity based on its author's complaints about not being published by the federal government. The report was not published by the government, but it was published and received far broader attention and a far larger audience than most of the reports published by the government.

This discussion now comes on the heel of the latest international assessment of achievement in mathematics and science. This study, called PISA (or Program for International Student Assessment), found American teenagers lagging far behind their peers in other nations in both subjects. Out of 30 developed nations that participated in the tests, U.S. students ranked lower than 16 other nations and below the international average. Our students did even worse in math.

The averages of even our top-scoring students in math were statistically worse than 23 of the participating nations, equal to those in Spain and Portugal. Only four countries had worse scores than ours: Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico.

Now surely, Gerald Bracey will find some way to try to belittle these findings. Presumably the Sandia engineers would say that our scores were dragged down by large numbers of minority kids, forgetting that they are part of the population we must educate. But when even our top-scoring students are way behind, then maybe we should pay attention.

In the 16 years since the Sandia report kerfuffle, their rosy view has been disproven again and again. We do need to improve American education. We need to improve it for the kids who have low scores, and we need to improve it for those who have top scores.

It is not simply a matter of economic competitiveness. It is a matter of our nation's commitment to democracy, to our belief that those who choose our leaders should be well-informed and active citizens. The basis of our democracy rests on our belief that the public will be educated to read, think, discuss, evaluate, and participate in decision-making for themselves and our society. That will not happen unless we have a public education system that is the best in the world.

Comments

[DebbieSmith]

The desire to reform our public education system is held within the recognition of a critical democratic norm of American society - equality. In order to uphold the notion of equality and democracy, overall reform of our schools should include:
1. Establishing a national test to measure student progress more accurately;
2. Raising compensation levels for high-quality teachers, especially in the areas of science, math and Special Education;
3. Providing better information on school performance to parents;
4. Eliminating district boundaries between schools allowing parents to choose the right school for their children, regardless of where they live;
5. Allowing greater flexibility for schools to hire and fire teachers;
6. Making school funding more transparent by attaching education dollars to the student instead of the school district.
For more information, visit www.paths2choice.com.

[jvarga]

Ok so half the people have decided the education system is a miserable failure. The other half don't think so.

So what are they doing in other countries that makes their systems infinitely better than the US system? All I see in these posts over and over is repeating how low the US ranks. Why doesn't anyone every say "in countries x y and z, which rank 1 2 and 3, they teach math this way".

Or are bruised egos more important?

[avergejoe]

"It is a matter of our nation's commitment to democracy, to our belief that those who choose our leaders should be well-informed and active citizens. The basis of our democracy rests on our belief that the public will be educated to read, think, discuss, evaluate, and participate in decision-making for themselves and our society."

Have seen/read most ANY msm news outlet lately?
Educating the public, about anything other than the Jennifer Aniston's Christmas plans, is NOT a priority.

[Wilburrr]

There are some excellent things happening in public education. There are also some very questionable practices. Public education today teaches a higher percentage of kids than ever before. Special education programs teach kids that have never been taught before. There are excellent programs at both ends of the spectrum but MSM concentrates on the negative. Conservatives would love to privatize public education. If you have any questions about the performance of public education, drop by your local school and volunteer. Take a look from the inside at what is actually going on.

[BillZBubb]

In the words of our Dear Leader: Is our children learning?

I would have to say No. When over half the population dismisses evolution because it is "just a theory", you know that our children is not learning and that our children not been learning for a long, long time.

[ShaunHammer]

Education will improve when do-nothing teachers that are a drain on the teaching system and do not teach our kids anything are fired. As a 20-something teacher myself I have older teachers around me that don't do anything. I take time, developing my lesson plan teach high school math/science the best I can, however, some of the do-nothing teachers do the same thing year-in-year-out whether it get results or not.
Children are our most prized treasure because they are going to be running this place someday, we need results...not tired practices that keep people who don't give a crap about teaching kids.

[YankeeCanuck]

Ms. Ravich, this is a really important post on a most serious problem-- thank you.Jonathan Kozol has been a voice in the wilderness on education since he wrote Death at an Early Age in 1967.Review below:
http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/education/kozol-excerpt.mhtml
So, how much has changed since then?
Now there's The Shame of the Nation-- theRestoration of Apartheid in American Education. Link to review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/books/review/25glazer.html

Because of these issues, so vital to who we are as a nation, Mr. Kozol has been on a partial fast to draw attention to this most serious problem.

It's pretty clear that is has been swept under the carpet all these years.
This is serious.

The number of future prisons to be built is decided today on the population of the fourth grade.
It would be cheaper to give children the education they deserve, from pre-school up. And to give parents the support they need as well.

[SamThornton]

As a non-expert, let me chime in with a couple of thoughts that professionals are not comfortable with approaching.

1) Part of the problem with K-12 public education is the sacred cow of local control, which makes public schools particularly vulnerable to the dictates of national publishers with dumbed-down texts, and to pressures from well-organized special interest groups with ideological axes to grind.

2) Local control of public education forgoes the economies of scale available with a national system, making the duplication of effort and added costs inherent with relatively small-scale management units, critical problems for public education nationally.

3) The current national effort to set standards (No Child Left Behind) completely ignores issues of rational curricula design and fostering a public educational environment conducive to attracting and retaining people with high ability.

Fixing problems with public education strike this non-expert as requiring something less than rocket science and something more than pandering to non-professional groups which have little understanding of the problems or the process.

[ProudAmericanLiberal]

The quality of education in the US has never been so poor. The solution is NOT privatization, it is committment to good public education.

[lisakaz]

If Sharri Sheppard can be used as evidence (and Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments), I'd say NO.