Public Education: An Autopsy [Paperback]

Myron Lieberman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 1995

In this blistering critique of our failing public schools and our fuzzy thinking about how to fix them, Myron Lieberman explains why public education is in irreversible and terminal decline and tells us what we must do to get American schooling back on track. No other book on educational policy or reform covers such a broad range of issues or draws upon such extensive empirical data across such diverse academic disciplines. This is a refreshingly clear analysis of our educational crisis and a rallying cry for market-system approaches to school reform. Nobody emerges unscathed--Lieberman's analysis challenges the advocates of choice as well as the defenders of the public schools.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

According to Lieberman, the notion that our founding fathers viewed public education as a way to educate citizens is preposterous. Democracy is not sustained by public schools, he claims; on the contrary, public schools are hotbeds for racism. A fierce opponent of the National Education Association, Lieberman grinds his ax against the public education monopoly with provocation. The author's analysis of societal trends and the declining social capital (i.e., the social relationships that foster children's growth and development) is both brilliant and chilling. He advocates a competitive market system for education, where for-profit schools would be a major but not exclusive component of the industry (a plan he details in Privatization and Educational Choice , LJ 9/15/89). His view is strictly an economic perspective, and he leaves other considerations aside. This book is an important challenge to supporters of public education and adds fire to the education debate. For all academic education and social sciences collections.
- Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

The most comprehensive account yet of how the public schools are failing us and why. It is exhaustive in its detail, brutally honest--and politically incorrect. Everyone who cares about American education should read it. No one who does will ever look at the public schools in quite the same way again. Myron Lieberman has spent his adult life working in and around schools, studying them with care and intensity, and producing a steady stream of books and articles that challenge conventional wisdom and the powers that protect it...[Public Education] deserves to be hailed as a landmark event in our nation's struggle for better schools--and it couldn't come at a better time.
--Terry M. Moe (Washington Post Education Review )

The public policy book of the year...[Lieberman] scrupulously, thoughtfully, and rigorously advances his position by examining trends that will erode public education even further in the near future...He [also] sets out an agenda for launching for-profit schooling, discusses obstacles that lie in its way and a strategy for overcoming them. (Booklist )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 394 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (February 24, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674722345
• ISBN-13: 978-0674722347
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,234,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book available on American public education., December 7, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Public Education: An Autopsy (Hardcover)

The one book I most strongly recommend that readers interested in education reform start with is Dr. Myron Lieberman's Public Education: An Autopsy (1993). Despite its radical-sounding title, Dr. Lieberman's book is thorough and moderate in its approach to these issues. Dr. Lieberman began his working career as a schoolteacher in the same urban public school he attended as a child. He is a life member of the National Education Association and has been writing books about education reform since 1956. Dr. Lieberman is also trained as a lawyer and spent many years as a negotiator for schoolteacher unions bargaining with school boards. Public Education: An Autopsy reflects the latest developments in Dr. Lieberman's thinking and is full of important information not found in other books about education. The book shows great compassion for learners, parents, and teachers and contains excellent endnotes guiding readers to additional research sources.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Details the flaws of the public education model, September 20, 2000

By 

Thomas Kearney - See all my reviews

This review is from: Public Education: An Autopsy (Paperback)

Unlike Sheldon Richman's passionate libertarian polemic, Separating School & State, which is like the light cavalry slashing through the defenses of the public education status quo, Myron Lieberman's Public Education An Autopsy is a dry, dispassionate examination of why public education is so difficult to reform and contrasts how certain problems would be handled better in the marketplace.

Lieberman stresses that the public education organizations, such as the NEA, are more focused on protecting the interests of the producers of education rather than catering to the needs of the consumers. For example, even though most bilingual education programs fail to teach Hispanic students English, the NEA and ethnic activist groups will still stridently support the programs because it provides jobs and patronage for their supporters. Though the jury is still out on bilingual education, it appears that since Proposition 209 in California passed, Hispanic students are doing well in English immersion. But, in the absence of voter pressure, the public schools never would have implemented this approach on its own.

Lieberman takes great pains to show that he being fair and balanced in this book, which may frustrate some libertarians who agree with Lieberman that we need a free market in education. But this book is very important reading for anyone who cares about education in America and the direction it needs to take.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Public Education, March 26, 2009

By 

Gerard Reed - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Public Education: An Autopsy (Paperback)

The year 1989 was a historic watershed: the Berlin Wall came down and the communist world stood exposed as a failed utopian experiment. That collapse should have prodded us to weigh the worth of other socialist ventures, especially when even the "democratic social welfare" states of Western Europe such as Sweden seem increasingly incapacitated by the intrinsic fallacies of Marxist ideology. Socialism's demonstrable failure--the inability of government to effectively own and control of the means of production--should instruct all of us as we chart our paths into the 21st century.
Exposed by this failure is one of the most important of all political questions: what is the real meaning of "equality," the actual equality embedded in the essence of our humanity. On this issue, Alexis de Tocqueville astutely noted: "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
We often fail to place education within the broader context of ethics and politics, which always struggle with such issues as freedom and equality. To liberate or to equalize is a choice educators must make. Some educational theories seek to grant equal opportunity to all at the point of access, then allowing free persons to perform in accord with their talents and character. Other educational theories seek to impose, through compensatory mechanisms of various sorts, an equality of "outcomes" which level individuals to a common denominator dictated by "fairness."
We who teach often feel like hanging our heads--and hardening our hearts--when confronted with the "latest" study of the "failure" of America's educational system. Year by year, even when "new instruments" are designed to more accurately measure student accomplishment (such as the recent exam developed in California allowing for ethnic diversity and encouraging thought rather than recall), the evidence mounts that today's students are simply not learning as they should. (The California test revealed that only seven percent of the students are proficient in mathematics!) Ironically, it seems, the more public education fails the more educators insist that the sole solution is money and facilities, more programs and classes--more of what's steadily failing: public education!
Myron Lieberman's latest work, Public Education: An Autopsy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, c. 1993), adds detailed indictments to the familiar litany of laments for our students' poor performance. But, in addition, it includes a prescription for renewal: alongside the public schools, he urges, we should allow a free market system to create hosts of more effective alternatives. At the very least, the author argues, even a step toward "market socialism" would allow options in education which would outperform the centralized, monopolistic, socialistic, government-run school system. (If you object to the use of the word "socialism," please consult the tenth objective of Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto which calls for "Free education for all children in public schools." On the other hand, by contrast, remember Thomas Jefferson's dictum that "to compel anyone to support with taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves is both tyrannical and cruel".)
The book's title, of course, indicates Lieberman's dour assessment of public education. The carcass still exists, gasping in its death throes, but its life has gone: "What has died is the rationale for public education" (p. 1). That's mainly because public education is producer-driven rather than consumer-driven. It's the teachers and their unions which determine educational policy rather than the parents and their children--or the business world which will hire them. Consequently, so-called educational reforms inevitably focus on and seek to empower teachers (more pay, smaller classes, better facilities, etc.) with little actual concern for the well being of students.
Lieberman especially indicts the teachers' unions for misleading the public. Though the media rely almost exclusively on National Education Association publications for salary data, such are carefully tailored to "substantially understate teacher compensation" (p. 78). Taxpayers rarely learn of the actual costs of the public schools and would probably revolt if they discovered their hidden revenues. State education bureaucrats and local school district press releases routinely "misinform their constituents about the educational achievement of their students" (p. 83).
The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers are heavily involved in the political system. They do everything possible to preserve their monopoly, basically established as the Department of Education has settled into the federal bureaucracy. Members of these unions formed the largest "interest group contingent of delegates" to the 1992 Democratic national convention (p. 312).
In the states as well, every effort is made to centralize and maintain control over the schools. Rather than elicit support from the public by proving the schools' proficiency, public educators seek to massage political powers to insure their privileges. So, for example, when a voucher system proposal surfaced in California, the state's superintendent of public instruction, Bill Honig, vowed to pour $10,000,000 into a campaign to defeat it. The president of a specialized firm which gathers signatures for such ballot initiatives was "offered $400,000 to refrain from gathering signatures for an initiative" (p. 337). He refused, but the CTA opened its vaults and funded the massive campaign which defeated the 1992 initiative.
School policies which mandate that no students shall fail, inflating grades so that all students imagine they are doing well, is yet another form of educational dishonesty. "Self-esteem" is certainly important (though not all-important), but to deceive students concerning their abilities (and to have them discover otherwise when unable to perform well in college or on the job) is reprehensible.
All of us must realize that more than jobs is at stake! The future of this country rests in the hands of those who educate our children. To compete in a global economy, we must educate young people as well as our European and Asian competitors. The need for math and science is self-evident, but, the Department of Education confesses, our 14-year-olds are near the bottom and our 18-year-olds are "last" when compared with students in other "advanced and developing countries." In math, only nine percent of our 13-year-olds could handle complex problems, "whereas 40 percent of the Koreans did so" (p. 145). Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have steadily declined for 25 years. (Here I must add that an Educational Testing Service study shows that 90 percent of the differences in test scores results from five factors: school attendance; time spent watching TV (the less the better); number of pages read for homework; number and quality of books in the home; and the presence of both parents in the home. I think it's obvious that the schools are not primarily to blame for students' failures.)
That is not to excuse the schools completely however, especially since they often claim more money and facilities will reverse the academic slump. Lieberman scoffs at the rationalization of many educators who argue that SAT scores have declined because the greater number of students taking the test makes it inevitable! Scholarly studies cited by the author show that "The underlying reason for the decline since the 1970's has not been the expansion of the pool of students taking the SAT but an actual decline in achievement" (p. 147). Educators often resort to blaming the umpire when test scores indict the system. Shooting the messenger is always easier than hearing his unwanted message!
Rather than shooting the messengers, it's time to begin probing alternatives. Just as the failed socialistic economies of Eastern Europe demonstrate the need for decentralized, market-oriented systems, so too the failure of America's socialized public education system proves the need for creative alternatives. Lieberman suggests a variety of approaches--including the use of tax monies for parochial and for-profit institutions--which would break the hammerlock of compulsory public education and enable parents and students to freely choose the kind of education which they judge best.