I Saw This

article in today's Daily Howler which pointed to a Washington Post column by someone critical of all of the bashing of public schools in the past twenty years since the fraudulent "A Nation at Risk" was published. The report, long since refuted by scholars and subsequent reports, claimed American schools were doing poorly as compared with other (homogenous) countries in all sorts of subject areas. We had to change our schools in order to defeat the competition or we were doomed.

Well, it was an old saw, used time and time again in American history. It continues today in flimsy reports like the one linked below in the NYT about the "dismal" state of student writing. The trouble is, true scholars don't get a word in edgewise in public discourse, so people think public schools are a waste of money and should be done away with or privatized. That's what the right-wing which funds these shoddy studies wants: to undermine public trust.

One of the biggest scandals that happened in the past twenty years in educational research, besides "A Nation at Risk," was the suppression of the Sandia Report by the Bush I administration because it undercut all of the lies told by the Reagan and Bush administrations. The report was released shortly after Clinton was inaugurated president and is available only in the May/June 1993 issue of the Journal of Educational Research. It is not online. It was a review of the literature with regard to various educational issues, and for the most part it held our nation's schools, from elementary to postsecondary, were doing a damned good job at educating its citizens.

(More on the next post, since I lost the first posting originally, and this is going to be long.)