How Education Got Screwed Up: (It Didn't!): Repost

I am reposting this because the President will resurrect it tonight during the SOTU speech. Remember this post as you listen to him tell us the same thing. Again.

Go read Gerald Bracey's 17th Education Report (pdf). Here is the how the whole education disaster started: our wrong-headed reaction to Sputnik (snippet):

U.S. News & World Report ran an interview with Bestor in late 1956 under the title “We Are Less Educated than 50 Years Ago.” After Sputnik, it brought him back for “What Went Wrong with U.S. Schools.” Bestor eschewed two common descriptors of life adjustment education — “flapdoodle” and “gobbledygook” — and said simply that, “in the light of Sputnik, ‘lifeadjustment education’ turns out to have been something perilously close to ‘death adjustment’ for our nation and our children. . . . We have wasted an appalling part of the time of our young people on trivialities. The Russians have had sense enough not to do so. That’s why the first satellite bears the label ‘Made in Russia.’”

No doubt Bestor believed what he said. Many people believed it. But it was utter nonsense. The U.S. could have beaten the Russians by over a year. Dwight David Eisenhower chose not to.

Update: PBS has a program on this very issue:

TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: November 6, 2007

On October 4, 1957, the Space Age dawned with the red hue of the Communist flag when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite. Sputnik I stunned the world and spurred a surge in science education and innovation that changed our world forever. But was Sputnik I really a shock to America's leaders, and how close was the U.S. to getting into space first? NOVA draws on previously classified documents to tell the real story behind the opening chapter in the space race. (For more on the space race, see a time line.)

"Sputnik Declassified" counters the popular view that President Dwight Eisenhower and the American science and defense establishments were caught completely off guard; and that Eisenhower was so behind the times that even after the success of Sputnik I, he still failed to recognize the importance of space.

Interviewed on the program are noted historians such as Roger Launius and Michael Neufeld of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and R. Cargill Hall, historian emeritus at the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

As NOVA shows, historians are beginning to realize that an elaborate strategic game was unfolding behind the scenes, with Eisenhower following a policy of divining Soviet military capabilities at all costs. By the early 1950s, the Russians were armed with nuclear weapons, and U.S. defense officials feared a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack.

Espionage inside Soviet territory was nearly impossible, and reconnaissance overflights were vulnerable and also forbidden by international law, which left Eisenhower with only one technically feasible but as-yet unproven alternative: to spy on the Soviets from the seemingly fantastic realm of space.

Ironically, the administration's concerted efforts to conceal this long-range project may have allowed the Russians to get into space first. Eisenhower approved a civilian venture to launch a scientific satellite and insisted that a non-military rocket carry the payload. This rocket, called Vanguard, had to be designed virtually from scratch.

In "Sputnik Declassified," NOVA probes the prehistory of the Space Age, examining what makes Earth orbit so difficult to achieve; why the superpower rivalry in the wake of World War II made spaceflight attainable for the first time in history; and how a worldwide civilian science effort called the International Geophysical Year served as the occasion for both Sputnik I and the American response.

One of the key U.S. pioneers of the early Space Age is also one of the most controversial. As the rocket program leader for Nazi Germany, Wernher von Braun developed the V-2 rocket, which was built with slave labor and rained destruction on England, Belgium, and France in the final year of World War II. (See more on Von Braun's tainted legacy.)

Brought to the U.S. with most of his staff after the war, von Braun spearheaded the development of long-range missiles for the U.S. Army. On September 20, 1956—more than a year before Sputnik I—the first of his Jupiter C missiles reached an altitude of 682 miles, from which its fourth stage could have easily boosted a payload into orbit. But the Department of Defense had already passed over the Army team in favor of Vanguard and had forbidden von Braun from developing any kind of orbital spacecraft.

Eight weeks after Sputnik I, Vanguard was finally ready—and exploded spectacularly on the launchpad. Now the tables were turned. Von Braun was given the go-ahead to get a satellite into orbit as soon as possible, which he achieved on January 31, 1958, with Explorer I, launched by a Jupiter C missile.

Von Braun's ultimate success and America's hurt pride and alarm over Sputnik I led to the founding of NASA and eventually to the triumphs of the Apollo program. Thanks to the space race that Sputnik I initiated, Eisenhower's secret spy satellites and von Braun's childhood dream of human travel to the moon both became reality.

Although many experts foresaw Sputnik I, few could have predicted that the simple metal sphere with a crude radio and two batteries heralded a fundamental rethinking of America's priorities, and ultimately helped create the world we live in today. Spaceflight, GPS, cell phones, satellite TV, even the personal computer and the Internet—all owe a debt to Sputnik I. (For more on Sputnik's legacy, go to What Satellites See.)

Gerald Bracey On Education Myths

I am reposting this because....well...just because.

Nine Myths About Public Schools

None of this will likely strike you as particularly new, but it might be good to have a bunch of myths lined up and debunked all in one place.

1. The schools were to blame for letting the Russians get into space first. Granddaddy of all slanders and a great illustration of the absolute nuttiness with which people talk about education.

Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, launched on October 4, 1957. On September 20, 1956, Werner von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a 4-stage Jupiter C rocket from Cape Canaveral. After the first 3 stages fired, the rocket was 832 miles in the air and traveling at 13,000 miles an hour. The 4th stage could have easily bumped something into orbit. The 4th stage was filled with sand. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that the Eisenhower administration was determined to keep its weapons rocket program and its space exploration project separate and von Braun's rocket was clearly a weapon. Its primary intent was to incinerate Russian cities with nuclear warheads. Ike worried how the Russians might react. His Assistant Defense Secretary Donald Quarles actually said "the Russians did us a favor" because they established the precedent that deep space was free and international.

Most US engineers in the space program in 1957 would have graduated high school in the 1930s, but in the media, the schools of the 1950s took the hit for Sputnik. Ike was quite puzzled by this.

2. Schools alone can close the achievement gap. This is codified in the disaster known as No Child Left Behind. Most of the differences come from family and community variables and many out-of-school factors, especially summer loss. Some studies have found that poor children enter school behind their middle class peers, learn as much during the year and then lose it over the summer. They fall farther and farther behind and schools are blamed. Middle class and affluent kids do not show summer loss.

3. Money doesn't matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates.

4. The United States is losing its competitive edge. China and India ARE Rising. As economies collapsed all around it, China's economy grew a remarkable 7% last year. On just humanitarian grounds, we should not wish China and India to remain poor forever, but the more they grow the more money they have to buy stuff from us. As China and India prosper, we prosper. The World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development have consistently ranked the U. S. economy as the most competitive in the world. Education is only one part of multi-factor systems in rankings. WEF is especially keen on innovation. Our obsession with testing makes testing a great instrument for destroying creativity.

5. The U. S. has a shortage of scientists, mathematicians and engineers. This was a myth started oddly enough by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s in a study with assumptions so absurd the study was never published, but the myth lingers on. In fact, Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found that we have three newly minted scientists and engineers who are permanent residents or native citizens for every newly minted job. Within 2 years, 65% of them were no longer in scientific or engineering fields. That proportion might have fallen during the current debacle when people are more likely to hang on to a job even if they hate it. An article in the September 18 Wall Street Journal reported that before the economy collapsed, 30% of the graduates of MIT--MIT--headed directly into finance.

6. Merit pay for teachers will improve performance. Bebchuk & Fried Pay Without Performance. Adams, Heywood & Rothstein, Teachers, Performance Pay, and Accountability. Bonus pay is concentrated in finance, insurance, and real estate. In most of private sector hard to determine and often leads to corruption and gaming the system. Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort the social processes it is intended to monitor."

7. The fastest growing jobs are all high-tech and require postsecondary education. "Postsecondary education" is a weasel word. A majority of the fastest growing jobs do, in fact, require some kind of postsecondary training. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they account for very few jobs. It's the Walmarts and Macdonald's of America that generate the jobs. According to the BLS, the job of retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.

8. Test scores are related to economic competitiveness. We do well on international comparisons of reading, pretty good on one international comparison of math and science, and not so good on another math/science comparison. But these comparisons are based on the countries' average scores and average scores don't mean much. The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development, the producer of the math science comparison in which we do worst has pointed out that in science the U. S. has 25% of all the highest scoring students in the entire world, at least the world as defined by the 60 countries that participate in the tests. Finland might have the highest scores, but that only gives them 2,000 warm bodies compared to the U. S. figure of 67,000. It's the high scorers who are most likely to become leaders and innovators. Only four nations have a higher proportion of researchers per 1000 fulltime employees, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Japan. Only Finland is much above the U. S.

Consider Japan, the economic juggernaut of the 1980's. It kids score well on tests and people made a causal link between scores and Japan's economy. But Japan's economy has been in the doldrums for almost a whole generation. Its kids still ace tests.

9. Education itself produces jobs. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan have both linked any economic recovery to school improvement. This is nonsense. There are parts of India where thousands of educated people compete for a single relatively low-level white-collar job. Some of you might recall that in the 1970's many sociologists and commentators worried that America was becoming TOO educated, that they would be bored by the work available.

Jim Horn Resurrects Gerald Bracey

Jim Horn reminds us how completely vacuous the reformers are:

[Gerald Bracey said in 2007:]

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can't answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn't be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called "unreasonable" results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better -- the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course -- on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation's seniors reached its "advanced" level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The "Leaders and Laggards" report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future -- and you can control them.

The 2009 Bracey Report

BRACEY-2009

Gerald Bracey, R.I.P.

From Mike Klonsky:

RIP Gerald Bracey

News is starting to trickle in on the sad passing of Gerald Bracey. Here's a note we received this morning from Monty Neill at FairTest:

Jerry's death is a stunning loss for all of us who advocate not only for better assessment but for schools that truly meet the needs of all children and an education system that meets the needs of the people, not just the dominant forces in the economy and politics. My, and FairTest's, sadness and condolences go to Jerry's family. Like too many, he is gone too early, too young, still too vibrant and engagement in this world of the living. I cannot think of anything better to say than Mother Jones' famous call: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." We shall do both.

Monty

******

Alfie Kohn: "Alas, Jerry Bracey has just died. Spirited crusader for accuracy, integrity; denounced false claims, misuse of stats; made the right enemies." Alfie urges us to read Bracey’s blog posts (http://bit.ly/73rrG) and his books – e.g., http://bit.ly/4iAb2u & http://bit.ly/9jpHf.

Update

US Test Scores Are Actually Very High

When we compare student scores internationally, Americans tend to appear to be less successful than our Asian counterparts. Really? No. It's bullshit. Read on...

Bracey Offers Some Facts to Go With Obama's Stale Education Rhetoric
Posted at Assessment Reform Network listserv:

. . . .He talks about American kids being behind and his reference is obviously test scores. But then he talks about creativity in charters. But the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) studies indicate charters are behind public schools in test scores. You can't evaluate one set of schools by test scores and then another set of schools with another criterion. Public schools are just as creative (Eric Robelen, "NAEP gap continuing for charters," Education Week 21 May 2008). Duncan turned a lot of schools into charter schools in Chicago, but I don't think he ever came back to see if they were working any better.

By the way, being behind doesn't seem to matter--test scores don't related to global competitiveness. The U. S. is #1 as ranked by both the Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum.

"In 8th grade math we've fallen to 9th place." That's out of 45 nations. In TIMSS of 1996 (tests administered in 1995) 8th graders were in 23rd place out of 41. We've come a long way, baby. How come no one ever mentions that American kids do better in science than in math and no one EVER talks about how well they do in reading which is very well indeed? Various citations, too many to list and the one with the above stat is not online anyway, "Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years." It's only mentioned at the US HQ for TIMSS and PIRLS studies, http://isc.bc.edu. The reading studies, PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), CAN be found there.

"Just a third of our 13- and 14- year olds can read as well as they should." This is garbage in light of the international comparisons mentioned above. It is also garbage because the reference is obviously NAEP, and as I've shown over and over the NAEP proficiency standards are outrageously unrealistic. In fact, by the criterion Obama is using, no nation has more than a third of its students reading "as well as they should." Sweden, the top scoring nation also has about one third at NAEP's "proficient" level (Richard Rothstein et alia, "Proficiency for all: An Oxymoron"). "A Test Everyone Will Fail" shows this in an international context. I wrote that for the Post a couple of years ago. Just put title into Google. "Oh, those NAEP achievement levels." I wrote that for a publication of the National Association of Secondary School Principals for whom I write a monthly column. You can find it a bunch of places on line like www.nabe.org/press.Clips/clip110805.htm.

The Koreans might be in school a full month longer, but in PISA (Program of International Student Assessment), America has a higher proportion of top scorers than Korea. More to the point, given the size of America, America has more top scorers than any other nation. No one even comes close. We have about 67,000, Japan about 3,4000. Top scoring Finland's proportion gives them about 2,000 actual warm bodies. (Lindsay Lowell (Georgetown) and Hal Salzman (Urban Institute and Rutgers). "Making the Grade." Nature, May 1, 2008

There were some good things in the talk, but our president has bought too much of the same old crap about the state of our education, crap that has been spewed since 1957 (Sputnik), 1967 (urban riots--schools took the hit), 1977 (the SAT decline), 1983 (A Nation At Risk--followed by the longest economic expansion in history), 1998 (International test scores again), 2002 (No Child Left Behind) and 2008 (Edin08).

In his inaugural address he said two thirds of the fastest growing jobs require extra education. What he didn't say was that those jobs account for very few jobs. For every computer engineer we need, Wal Mart needs 15 or so salespeople. Today he said "By 2016, four out of every 10 new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training." That's not what the BLS says. And what does "advanced education or training mean, anyway? It's a weasel phrase. By the way, we have about 3 newly minted, home-grown scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields and 65% of them leave those fields within 2 years of graduating (Lowell & Salzman, "Into the eye of the storm: assessing the evidence on science and engineering, quality, and workforce demand." www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411562_salzman_Science.pdf).

I present a complete history of the continual and unfair criticism of schools in Education Hell--the Betrayal of American Schools which should be published next month.

Alas, the fear mongers--Bob Wise, Roy Romer, Bill Gates (who has said some REALLY dumb things), Craig Barrett, Lou Gerstner, etc., get the media attention. Guess it's cause they got the money. They certainly don't have the chops.