That's right - they're wrong

Nothing can be done with our schools until the basic problem is solved--and no one even sees what it is.

CHESTER FINN of the Educational Excellence Network is wrong. Michael Levin,. controversial professor at the City College of New York is wrong. John Chubb, scholar at the Brookings Institution, is wrong. Former Yale University President Benno Schmidt and Christopher Whittle, partners in the Edison Project to build a thousand "innovative" private schools, are wrong. Past and present U.S. Secretaries of Education William Bennett and Lamar Alexander are wrong. So were Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. And so are President Bush, Congress, fifty governors, and virtually everyone in the media. They all were and are tragically wrong.

The primary reason the U.S. has the poorest schooling in all the developed countries is not, as Mr. Finn says, the lack of "world class standard" achievement tests. It is not, as Mr. Levin says, "the staggering energy expended to bring American Negroes into the educational mainstream." It is not, as Mr. Chubb says, the lack of "vouchers for free choice." It is not bureaucratic bungling or the high cost of federally mandated programs such as racial busing, free lunches, Head Start, and Even Start. It is not the lack of homework. Nor is it crowded classrooms, low expectations, easy curricula, working mothers, missing fathers, TV, automatic promotions, the NEA's leftist agenda, poor discipline, too much testing, too little testing, drugs, or godless textbooks.

The major sottree of America's catastrophic educational predicament cannot be our inability to cope with any of these mostly social and governmental afflictions. For the level of U.S. educational achievement fell long before any of these problems appeared.

It started to sink 25 years before anyone but NAACP attorneys had expended any energy bringing blacks into the "educational mainstream." It sank 28 years before Congress, scared by the launching of Russia's Sputnik, passed the first inclusive education appropriations bill. It sank 35 years before court-ordered busing, 21 years before the first 4 million "baby boom" first-graders crowded into classrooms built for 3 million, and 25 years before most American families owned TVs.

For five decades business and political leaders, who notice the slightest change in interest rates, sales figures, or voting trends, have watched the ratings for U.S. school performance drop from excellent to good to fair to poor to pathetic to abysmal with little indication--before the 1980s--that they saw anything alarming. They watched, without even noticing, the incredible multiplication of illiterate schoolchildren--who were growing into illiterate teens, who were growing into 40 million illiterate or barely literate citizens.

How Could It Happen?

SUCH blindness is almost impossible to understand. But with hindsight we can see some of the reasons.

--Most of the 12 million World War II veterans and their wives were too busy moving from wartime to peacetime to Korean War-time and back to peacetime in less than eight years to notice that many of their children (almost 40 out of 100) were not learning to read in the first three grades.

--From 1951 to 1975, administrators and teachers blamed big classes crowded with baby-boomers for the extraordinary number of failures.

--Long busing routes for "racial balance" that shrank class periods and stretched distances between parents and teachers are still cited as major reasons.

--School critics often focus on the least important considerations. In 1982 a ratio of 39 students to 1 computer was regarded by a Newsweek writer as strong evidence that those who budgeted school dollars were grossly incompetent. Yet seven years later, when National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports revealed that 2 out of 3 17-year-olds could not read well enough to do highschool work in any subject--with or without a computer the critics were bewilderingly silent.

--For a half-century two sets of statistics used by professionals and the media to measure educational achievement-literacy rates and reading grade levels-have confused most Americans. They are not what most people think they are.

"Official" literacy rates, published after the Census every ten years, have been as fictional as Little Red Riding Hood ever since 1940. Through 1930, Census takers counted readers--by giving reading tests if necessary. But starting in 1940 Census no longer counted readers. Instead, it counted as literate adults with a certain number of years of school attendance.

Correctly interpreted, then, the official 1980 and 1990 literacy rates of 95 per cent and 95.5 per cent indicate that 95 to 96 out of 100 U.S. residents have attended American schools for at least five years. This may be valuable information, but it has little to do with literacy. Schooling for any length of time no longer equals literacy.