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The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools

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Whether you are reading reviews HERE or the Stedman's review and subsequent heated debate in the reviewed journal (check ERIC database), you couldn't help but get the feeling that THERE IS ENOUGH EVIDENCE and ENOUGH ANALYSES to justify EITHER sides of the argument, depending on your political and educational convictions. I am a cognitive psychologist and does research in schools. I felt that, short of checking up on every source and reading every cited papers by myself, I won't be able to draw a clear conclusion. However, maybe the differing points are not the only important part here. If we listen to what people do not argue, there lies the agreements between authors and reviewers.

1) Leave the issue of whether our overall aggregate achievement is declining or not, we can agree that schools in poor areas are funded poorly, and their students are achieving poorly by most standards.

2) Leave the political argument aside, we can agree that it is NOT FAIR to entirely blame (or credit) teachers or schools for underserved students' achievements. Our political system and culture must take a compassionate stand along with the accountability perspective in order to help these students.

3) Teachers can make differences in achievements if properly supported, but not overly burdened, tested, pressured, and mandated.

Let's put down the liberal or conservative or neo conservative hats for a bit. I think most Americans with good hearts agree that we should do what we can to help even the poorest child achieve. Common sense says that slapping more tests on that poor child isn't going to do it. Common sense says that slapping the child's teacher in the face for the child's failure isn't going to do it. Common sense also says just handing bundles of cash to the teacher or school isn't going to do it either. A problem inherent in the system must be addressed systemically, on all fronts.

The authors did favor one particular point of view and did selectively represent the evidence. But they are justified, given how one-sided the debate had been from our government to television to homes to even education circles. The defense tends to rise to the level of the offense, and we can mostly agree that the offense has been vicious and just as biased, if not more.

All in all, this book is WORTH reading. The debate between Stedman and authors are worth reading too. If you read both, I think that you would walk away less opinionated in either direction, and more compassionate towards the poor and low-achieving children of our country.

Berliner and Biddle are obviously coming from the opposite end of the spectrum than the writers of A NATION AT RISK. While it is refreshing to read a critique of American education that doesn't blame everything on the teachers, one must read this book as critically as Berliner and Biddle read the Bush administration report. Certainly, as an education grad. student, I found the idea that our government, by publishing A NATION AT RISK, falsified statistics, and, basically, made a flawed educational system seem disasterous. However, I feel it necessary to consider B & B's agenda--very liberal, and as another reviewer pointed out in discussing exchange rates and the per student expenditure of foreign countries, the pair may be as guilty of "shady statistics" as they accuse the authors of A NATION AT RISK. In all, I find this book provides a nice balance to all those education doomsayers, but must be taken with the same grain of salt.

Several reviewers make criticisms of the book, but to tell you the truth, they are just nibbling around the edges. None of them is able to make inroads against the premise. Moving the U.S. from the bottom of the middle to the top of the middle is not very meaningful. We are solidly in the middle of performance by most measures.

Too many graphs? Only if you think people shouldn't understand the content!

The book's arguments could have been attacked differently, I suppose. On the other hand, if people were kicking you in the shins and calling you names, I would give you a pass on being grumpy. "Climategate" baloney comes to mind.

When the dust settles on think tank sociology, there will be some horribly disfigured reputations at places like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In the meantime, we need to quit believing certain people and quit mistaking FUD for reality. As old as it is, this book helps you distinguish the major players. It also helps you learn to think critically about the dialog surrounding education.

Just last week, Klein said he was going to close 13 public high schools in New York. Some of the schools are not making great progress, but the population of special needs students has burgeoned because they are NOT put in the charter schools the chancellor is so proud of. This book puts it in perspective. The special needs population has double the overhead of normal population, so these schools are suffering about a 30% hit to their budgets.

If they are doing 5% worse than the mayor's precious charter schools, he should die of embarrassment.

Berliner and Biddle have written an excellent book about the "manufactured crisis" in American schools. They show in great detail the ways in which standardized test data can be very deceptive and also how the tests themselves are not nearly as significant as they are made out to be by ivory tower policymakers. They accurately notice that the most pressing problems facing the public schools in America today are not the lack of standardization but the enormous disparities between the haves and the have nots which are magnified in schools. They have come to the common sense conclusion that public schools which are racially segregated, underfunded, understaffed, dilapidated, and/or overcrowded will produce lower expectations and results than those schools which have ample resources. Though the authors take cheap shots at private schools, this book is nonetheless a valuable rebuttal to proponents of excessive standardized testing and school vouchers.

David C Berliner and Bruce J Biddle wrote a book titled "The Manufactured Crisis: Myth, Fraud and Attack on America's Public Schools". The authors assert that it is a "myth that America spends a lot more on education than other countries". To back-up this claim, the authors present a chart on page 67 of the book which gives "k-12 expenditures for education in 16 different nations in 1985 (based on 1988 exchange rates)". All expenditures were given in American dollars. Since the fifteen foreign nations do not use the American dollar as their currancy, exchange rates were used to convert their spending levels to American dollars. Please note, however, that the year that the expenditures occured(1985) and the year of the exchange rates (1988) are different. Since exchange rates constantly change, the reported level of expenditures will vary depending upon which years exchange rates are used. If the 1985 exhange rates are used, the average level of per-pupil expenditures would be $2,523 for the fifteen foreign nations. If the 1988 exchange rates are used, this figure is inflated to $3,780. That is an increase of 49.8 percent. If the 1985 exchange rates are used, the United States ranks fourth among the sixteen industrialized countries in terms of per-pupil expenditures. Because this book uses the 1988 exchange rates, it asserts that the United States ranks ninth among these countries in terms of per-pupil eductational expenditures. Between 1981 and 1989, the dollar reached its lowest value in relations to other currencies in 1988. Therefore, the 1988 exchange rates inflate the foreign nations spending levels by the greatest amount.

Most economists do not consider exchange rates to be the best measure to compare levels of spending in different countries. This is because price levels differ between countries. In 1988 for example, the avereage price of a product in Switzerland was 54.5% higher than it was in the United States. Therefore, if an American school was given ten thousand dollars, it would be able to purchase more than would a Swiss school that was given a comparable amount of money. To compensate for these price differences, economists try to determine what the exchange rate would be if the price level were the same in each country. Economist refer to this rate of exchange as purchasing power parity (PPP).

To demonstrate how the purchasing power parity exchange rate would affect the comparisons, one only needs to examine the authors claim on page 67. The authors state that "the United States ranked only ninth among sixteen industrialized nations in per-pupil expenditures for grades k through 12, spending 14 percent LESS than Germany, 30 percent LESS than Japan, and 51 percent LESS than Switzerland". If the purchasing power parity exchange rates are used, the United States ranks fifth among sixteen industrialized nations in per-pupil expenditures for grades k through 12, spending 17 MORE than Germany, 23 percent MORE than Japan, and only 21 percent LESS than Switzerland.

No where else in the book do the authors make comparisons by mismatching exchange rates. For example, on page 225, the authors quoted a book which compared the per capita gross domestic product of various countries. The authors of that book did not mismatch the year of the exhange rates to determine a given country's per capita gross domestic product. On page 93 of the book, the authors quoted a report which compared American worker productivity with worker productivity in other nations. This report used exchange rates that are based on the purchasing power parity method that was described above.

The book states that it is a "myth that America spends a lot more money on education than other countries". This is not a myth. The real myth is the book's assertions about education spending. It should also be noted that most of these other countries have higher academic standards for their students in high school.

Because the authors do not deal properly with economic data, I also wonder about the accuracy of other data that is presented in this book. Consequently, I would not recommend that anyone buy this book

Authors Berliner and Biddle take up the subject of how bad our schools really are and pronounce them to be pretty darn good, thank you. From a statistical point of view this may be true and probably is true. This reminds me of Westmoreland's argument that we were winning the Vietnamese War. "We are killing more of them than they are killing us." Yes, well, we all know where statistics can take you. I don't dispute their argument. At one level, they are right. What they can't find a chart for, however, is that fact that our kids can't write. They don't read. They come to college with junior-high school educations. Their counterparts in Asia and Europe, and possibly elsewhere, learn foreign languages, can do math, and are literate in their own languages. It is true that the schools are not to blame for every ill, but they are to blame for much that admittedly cannot be easily measured. Note the lack of manners in our young, their lack of curiosity, their unfiltered adoration of pop culture (rap, TV, commercialism), and their ignorance of fine culture. They have been to school, but curiously remain unschooled. Part of this is surely the degenerate households they come from, but an equal part comes from the low standards to which they are held at schools where they are allowed to cultivate, shall we say, their baser selves. Many teachers condone this vulgarity so as to appear hip and cool to their younger charges. Whatever it is, America's youth are to be avoided at all cost, locked out of malls by appalled shoppers, and shunned if not feared by their own parents. Schools are not to be fully completely blamed, but what have they done to help?

This is an angry book, written by two angry authors. Very difficult to read as a serious work because it seems to have more emotion than fact. The authors present "data", but their interpretation of the plain data seems off at times, and quite twisted at other times. They attack the thoroughly documented "Nation At Risk" as though it was pulp fiction, and belittle other noteworthy studies in a similar manner. Berliner has a tremendous religious bias (blatantly anti-Christian) that is extremely unsavory, if not unscholarly, and seems to have so many "Aha!" moments that one begins to doubt anything he says. His classic "...but IF you read the data carefully, it REALLY means...." just gets old. Facts are facts. SAT scores have been in a serious decline since the 1960s. The ETS people changed the test under dubious pretenses in the 1980s, and did so again this past year. Why ? The reasons vary, but when you find yourself measuring up, get a smaller stick! Berliner's work tries to hypnotize its readers into believing what common sense observations have told us all for years: public schools are violent places; drug havens; mediocre learning institutions full of over-paid and undereducated 'teachers'. Newspaper stories we see nearly every day corroborate this. If the newspapers are guilty of anything, it is under-reporting of these problems.
One final note: I taught at an American public high school last year that was considered quite good by the community, and we had nearly 200 arrests on our campus that year !

Parents: if you had 200 arrests at your place of business last year, what conclusions would YOU have about your place of work ? Is your place of work so prone to outbreaks of violence and illegal drug use that it requires the work of several on and off-site police officers? Would you tolerate this situation yourself ? I didn't think so.

Then why do you tolerate it for your adolescent son or daughter ?

This book has a shrill conspiracy theory tone that is not completely muted by its exhaustive documentation, and its repeated sneering references to "neoconservatives" and the "religious right" are both irritating and unnecessary. However, it convincingly refutes, point by point, the scathing criticism of public school education that I have read and heard for over twenty years. More importantly, it clearly articulates todays most serious and ignored problems in American education. I wish every policy maker from the local school board member to the President of the United States would read it.

Berliner and Biddle have written a badly needed antidote to conventional wisdom about pubic education in the United States. At least since publication of the polemical pamphlet A Nation at Risk in 1983, public education has taken the blame for virtually every social and economic problem faced by the U.S. Berliner and Biddle seek to set the record straight, and, for the reader who had not already made up his or her mind, they do a good job. I think, however, that their book would have been even more compelling if they had avoided what I take to be rather serious errors.

First, Berliner and Biddle let stand the notion that education is a leading institution rather than a secondary one, over-shadowed by the economy and polity. As a result, readers are left with the badly mistaken notion that if payoffs for investments in public schooling are diminished, the fault must be with education. In truth, however, since the demise of the Era of the Social Contract, which ran from 1946 to 1972, the supply of good jobs has been dramatically diminished due to outsourcing, down-sizing, internationalization, and technological developments. Prospective employers are seeking to reduce labor costs, they are doing so in ways which dramatically degrade the U.S. labor market, and there is nothing that schools can do about it. In short, labor market degradation is taken to be evidence of decline in the quality of schooling, and education as an institution wrongly gets the blame.

Second, Berliner and Biddle sometimes mistake friends for enemies and enemies for friends. In this vein, they are quite hostile to what is sometimes referred to as the first Coleman report, published in 1966 under the title Equality of Opportunity. It is true that in his later work Coleman joined the ranks of the school bashers and became a champion of private schooling. But what did he and his co-authors say in 1966: schools do all sorts of good things, but they are not agents of upward social mobility and they do not sever ties between background factors and subsequent achievement both in school and beyond.

Rather than reject these findings as hostile to schooling, Berliner and Biddle would do well to embrace them as helping to make their case: schools work and they work well; just don't expect them to accomplish the impossible, to achieve ends they were never designed to achieve. In other words, again, schools cannot overcome the limitations imposed by over-arching contextual factors.

Third, in a really odd move, Berliner and Biddle embrace the findings of Chubb and Moe as presented in Politics, Markets, and America's schools. They do so because Chubb and Moe find that certain patterns of administrative organization, which they claim can be adopted universally, will make schools more effective at promoting achievement. But Berliner and Biddle fail to acknowledge that the organizational pattern espoused by Chubb and Moe is that which applies to private secondary schools. Fundamental to Chubb and Moe's model is complete rejection of all higher order values which might interfere with market forces. I can see why Berliner and Biddle would welcome a finding that schools are subject to improvement, but at the sacrifice of higher-order values, specifically equality of educational opportunity ...? (For what it's worth, Chubb and Moe's empirical work is dubious at best.)

Fourth, Berliner and Biddle never really come to terms with the current over-emphasis on accountability and the limitations of standardized tests as the one and only way to gauge school performance. Since the Manufactured Crisis was published, we have seen even further exaggeration of the role of standardized testing, and the results, for people who work in schools and see the consequences first hand, have been disastrous.

Berliner and Biddle have written a good book. I am grateful to them. Yes, it is polemical, but far less so than histrionic diatribes such as A Nation at Risk.

Whether Berliner and Biddle are discussing the "myths" about achievement and schools, the power of right- wing disinformation, or the contrast between neoconservative and progressive reforms, they repeatedly offer a one-sided treatment of the evidence. They accept at face value any information that supports their viewpoint, while they dissect and reinterpret any information that challenges it. The purpose of academic training and scholarship is to rise above such flawed rationality; to learn how to critically analyze the evidence that supports your own favored arguments--and to treat fairly the evidence that contradicts it. It is also a matter of learning to accept the complexity and ambiguity of evidence--and to fairly present that. Unfortunately, Berliner and Biddle failed to do this.They ignored or dismissed entire areas of relevant evidence--such as the extensive data on students' low levels of achievement and knowledge--and, in selectively presenting other evidence--such as the data on test score trends--they winnowed out only that which supported their viewpoint and discarded the rest. In several cases, they have even directly misrepresented the actual data. The actual evidence on student achievement is crucial to their argument. It directly addresses their claim that U.S. students are achieving well and that the educational crisis has been "manufactured". Instead of systematically reviewing the evidence, they selected a few pieces of data on each topic and reinterpreted them to suit their argument. They concentrated on trends (mostly stable) but ignored levels of achievement (mostly low). They ignored a large and growing body of research which shows that student achievement has been weak for several decades. Our high school students lack important knowledge in history, civics, geography, and English; they have done poorly in mathematics and science and few write well. The evidence is overwhelming that the achievement crisis is real. In the next section, I report on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results. They analyzed the test score decline in a misleading fashion. Although they rightfully criticized the myth of a RECENT general achievement decline, they ignored the 1970s decline and failed to present any of the contradictory evidence from the 1980s. They clearly overstated the case when they claimed "only ONE test, the SAT" ever suggested a decline (p. 35 emphasis original).

Worse, they then overreached and tried to cast current achievement in an historically positive light. Without the needed evidence, they claimed that this generation of students achieves "substantially" higher than previous ones on "virtually all" commercial standardized tests--a contention that is directly refuted by the major reviews of historical trends on such tests.