With Gery Chico back in 'education,' it's nice to note some of his earlier lies... Gerald Bracey's 'Rotten Apple' Awards for 2000 said all there needed to be said about William Bennett's dishonesty... Bennett is now being dusted off by America's corporate media (CNN and others) to help Arne Duncan d
[Editor's Note. The following is obviously published following Jerry's October 2009 death. it's rare that we will be publishing a piece of work a decade old as 'news', but the following 'Rotten Apple' awards for the year 2000 by Jerry Bracey needs a second look. With people all over the education nation reading Diane Ratitch's mea culpa (which I'm in the process of reviewing carefully), it's important to take a close look at the people promoting the destruction of public education now being carried out by Arne Duncan and the Obama administration. Interestingly, half the people named by Bracey in 2000 are still going about their misdeeds, and just as dishonestly. In February 2010, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed former Chicago Board of Education President Gery Chico President of the City Colleges Board. One of the smaller joys of re-reading Bracey's old "Rotten Apples" is to note that a decade ago, Bracey was reporting the lies of Gery Chico about the city's public schools. The following was from Jerry's 'Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (EDDRA) which still can be found on line. George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance].
Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency -- a Gerald Bracey Report on the Condition of Education
THE ROTTEN APPLES OF 2000 By Gerald W. Bracey
THE "LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HIGH TEST SCORES" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: William J. Bennett
If Bennett were a former secretary of defense rather than a former secretary of education, and had disparaged the military the way he has deprecated public schools, he would have been charged with treason and summarily shot. As it is, the author of The Book of Virtues has now arranged his own sense of virtues in a strange priority order.
In March, 2000, Bennett addressed a Heritage Foundation audience on the 25th anniversary of Heritage's existence. Speaking on "The State, and Future, of American Education," he could well have won the Most Cliches in the Shortest Time award, but one statement stands out above his hackneyed and often erroneous banalities. Turning to standards and testing, Bennett said, "In this regard, I must say I am alarmed and worried about the reaction of many parents to the new standards movement; many are retreating. A recent survey showed that when parents are choosing a school for their child high test scores are one of the least important factors in their decision. The most important factor in their decision: the child's happiness…Armed with public opinion, we can wear down the unions. But if the parents go soft, we are done."
Imagine that, parents valuing happiness over high test scores. How dare they!
THE "FACT CHECKERS ARE A DRAIN ON THE ECONOMY" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: William J. Bennett
In an op-ed in the September 4, 2000 edition of The Washington Post, Bennett declared that "About half of high school graduates have not mastered seventh grade arithmetic." My crap detector went ballistic. In the first place, we don't test high school graduates so how would he know? Second, Bennett provided no definition of "mastery", a term not common in the world of testing (unlike, say, "basic, proficient, or advanced"). Finally, what on earth is "seventh grade arithmetic?"
I called Bennett's office and was told that he got it from The Book of Knowledge. The tome in question is not your familiar childhood encyclopaedia, but a 1999 publication by Michael Moe, Director of Global Growth Research at Merrill Lynch. Moe is perhaps the most ardent advocate of "the education industry" around. Sure 'nuf, there it was on page 4, in a section called "just the facts ma'am."
Naturally, I called Moe's office. I was told that "the statement refers to an interpretation of 1996 results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests." Are they kidding? There is no possible way to get from NAEP scores or NAEP proficiency levels to Moe's statement. Even if we were to assume that "below basic" corresponded to lack of mastery of 7th grade arithmetic, the relevant proportion of high school seniors is 31%. In most people's figuring, that doesn't come close to "about half." If Moe thinks 31% is "about half", then Merrill Lynch investors are imperiled.
THE "FACT CHECKERS ARE A DRAIN ON THE ECONOMY" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD, PART II To: Michael Moe, Merrill Lynch.
Moe's "Just the Facts" segment of his book is perhaps the largest array of spun and false statistics since "A Nation At Risk." For instance, he states that "Nationally, all teachers--public and private--are 50% more likely than the general public to send their children to private schools."
Well, I didn't need to ask him where that little lie came from, and Kappan readers might very well recognize it, too. It is from a masterpiece of misleading rhetoric written by Dennis Doyle and published by Jeanne Allen and her Center for Educational Reform. This report, on where teachers send their kids to school is thoroughly debunked in "The Fifth Bracey Report."
The statement is not true under any circumstances. Doyle somehow miscalculated. He found that 13.1% of the general public and 17.1% of public and private school teachers send their kids to private school. He then wrote the 50% more statement that Moe cited. But 17.1% is only about 30% larger than 13.1%. Moe swallowed it whole, arithmetical error and all.
More importantly, the statement becomes completely false if private school teachers are removed. Even Doyle had enough integrity left to acknowledge that "Public school teachers, as a group choose private schools less often than the public at large by a one-point margin, 12.1% to 13.1%." Later on, Doyle observed that only one-third of private school teachers send their kids to private schools.
If Moe and others use Doyle's findings as an indictment of public schools, how much more are private school damned with this last statistic.
THE "KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT" GOLDEN APPLE AWARD To: David Lloyd, South High School, Grosse Pointe Michigan
Lloyd, the Associate Op-Ed Page Editor of The Tower, the student newspaper at South High School in Grosse Pointe Michigan, was intrigued by all he had heard about the Willard Daggett affair created by Daggett's fantabulisms at North High School (See: Who Cares About Facts? Rotten Apple Award, 9th Bracey Report). He checked it all out--for months. The result was a devastating spread in the April 19 edition of the Tower, occupying two of the 8 pages of the 11" by 17" paper.
Lloyd penned a long essay for the story proper, with two halves of the spread bookending a picture of Daggett dancing on a stage, his hands held above his head, looking for all the world like a televangelist. In a side bar, Lloyd refuted nine specific Daggett contentions and noted that there were "at least a dozen more examples". Daggett had alleged in correspondence that I had attacked William Raspberry. Since Raspberry has penned some five columns on my work, all favorable, I knew this to be ludicrous. Lloyd found it so as well. With typical thoroughness shown throughout the piece, Lloyd called Raspberry who denied the allegation and went on to say some nice things about my work and me.
Lloyd constructed a side-bar listing nine specific Daggett allegations, then refuting them using as sources people such as Greg Harness, Head Librarian of the U. S. Senate (Daggett claimed to have testified before a congressional committee); David Robitaille, a coordinator of TIMSS (Daggett made several claims about how other countries teach various subjects); Renee German, Database manager for the College Board (refuting Daggett's claim on what proportion of community college in the nation admit students without a high school diploma); Lyle Skillian, Arizona Director of Charter Schools (debunking Daggett's pronouncement 54% percent of Arizona students were in charter schools--Skillian said 4% and it was only 2% at the time Daggett made the claim).
Look for Lloyd to win the Woodward and Bernstein Golden Apple sometime in the next decade.
David Lloyd, "Fact or Fiction?" The Tower, South High School, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, April 16, 2000, pp., 4-5.
THE "NO, YOU'RE NOT A HAM, HAM CAN BE CURED" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To Willard R. Daggett
Washington Post education writer, Jay Mathews, also had a less than flattering commentary on Daggett, using him as the horrible example centerpiece of an article on what's wrong generally with educational inservice programs. Daggett told Mathews that any statistical errors he made were due to the fact that in Grosse Pointe he had "spent a long day on his feet." A most curious comment. On the videotape where Daggett develops most of his confabulated "facts", the first words out of his mouth are "Good morning, everyone!"
The Schenectady Daily Gazette saw the Washington Post piece and, since Daggett's headquarters are in Schenectady, felt obliged to follow up. The Gazette article detailed most of the errors. Reporter Katy Moeller, though added an additional personal dimension when she said that "Bracey is the person Daggett called 'the harasser'."
"'I have never met him,' said Daggett who at one point blinked back tears when describing the harassment." In phone conversation, Moeller said that Daggett had dried his tears long enough to threaten her and her editors about the article and to have his lawyer do the same.
THE "DAMN-THE-FACTS-FULL-IDEOLOGY-AHEAD" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: Tracy Thomas, President of the Goldwater Institute, Phoenix
In an article attacking Arizona State University School of Education Dean, David Berliner, Thomas denied the central thesis of The Manufactured Crisis. "The fact is that the crisis is alarmingly real. Standardized test scores are on the decline."
Oh? NAEP scores are at all-time highs. The proportion of students scoring above 650 on the SAT-M is at an all-time high and average SATs are up slightly (verbal) and substantially (math).
Still, the lone tests for which we have truly long-term data, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, have shown a downward tendency in recent years in Iowa. This could be important because, since 1955 when the ITBS underwent a major revision, ITBS scores in the nation and in Iowa have tracked each other very closely.
The scores rose from 1955 to about 1965 (the year differs slightly depending on grade). Then they fell from roughly 1965 to roughly 1975. Remember that decade? Lots of people don't except in flashbacks. It opened with the Watts Riots in Los Angeles which spread across the nation. It included the Summer of Love, Woodstock and Altamont. It featured Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Events of the decade included the Chicago Police Riot of 1968, Kent State, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert f. Kennedy, Jr., and Malcolm X. Not to mention two little dustups called Vietnam and Watergate.
Under these circumstances, no one should be surprised if people were paying less attention to parsing sentences or factoring equations than in the past.
But around the time the last American helicopter left Saigon, the scores started back up and, by the mid to late 1980's (again depending on grade), had reached record levels. Why wasn't this news?
Since about 1993, though, scores have been edging down in Iowa. We don't if they're falling nationally because we have no recent national norming samples which provide that data. Such data have been collected and should be available about the time this report is published.
H. D. Hoover reports that nationally, the "user norms" that he gathers are stable. However, user norms come from districts that actually use the ITBS and might not reflect national trends with complete accuracy. Although the "user" norms come from changes in user districts, students in those districts probably take the test under higher motivation than they do when they take the tests as part of a national norming study. The user norms are stable, leading one to expect at least small declines in the national norms.
Why are scores falling in Iowa? Hoover used to think it was due to too much attention to self-esteem. He still thinks there is less intense instruction in the early grades than previously, but has also come around to my hypothesis: changing demographics. Iowa is no longer frozen in time. It has substantial number of non-native English speakers emigrating from Mexico, Bosnia and Cambodia. In addition, much of the job creation in Iowa in the last decade has been at the entry level. Thus even native English speakers immigrating to Iowa are not necessarily coming to take positions in executive suites.
David Frisbie, an associate director of the Iowa programs thinks that children are bringing fewer language skills to school than in the past. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
THE "DAMN-THE-URBAN-LEGENDS, LET'S SEE WHAT THE FACTS SAY" GOLDEN APPLE AWARD To: W. Wayt Gibbs, senior writer for Scientific American and Douglas Fox, a San Francisco-based free lance writer.
Listening to the gnashing of teeth occasioned by the alleged results from TIMSS Final Year Study, writers Gibbs and Fox looked into the situation and gave their conclusions in their article in the October, 1999 issue of Scientific American: "The False Crisis in Science Education."
Even accepting the conclusion that American students fall behind, Gibbs and Fox observe that NAEP science scores are rising and that American adults do better than school children: "The fact that U. S. 12th graders fall behind on international tests* does not mean that American know less about science than adults in other nations do. In fact, U. S. residents have consistently demonstrated a firmer grasp of basic science facts than have denizens of many countries that dramatically outperformed the U. S. on TIMSS." (p. 92).
The authors point out that only physics enrollments are down and that due mostly to a lack of jobs. "In other fields, forecasters worry more about a flood of new scientists than about a shortage of them. Last year, a National Research Council report urged universities to freeze the size of their biology graduate programs for this very reason" (p. 89). They also show graphically that while the number of technical degrees garnered by foreign students is rising faster than the increase of degrees for U. S. citizens, that latter number is rising as well. In addition, 68% of the foreigners stay here. This can be seen as something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand it constitutes a large brain gain, but on the other increases the competition for job slots.
Missing no opportunity to slam schools, some critics have even blamed them for the shortage of high-tech workers. Gibbs and Fox, though, point out that public school reform is a slow and uncertain method for addressing changes in the economy. They quote a Computing Research Association officer saying "When the personnel department wants people who have three years of experience with a technology that's only 18 months old, they're not going to find them."
Reference
W. Wayt Gibbs and Douglas Fox, "The False Crisis in Science Education," Scientific American, October, 1999, pp. 87-92.
*I contend that they likely do not fall behind, even though the flaws in the study make any firm conclusion impossible. See my May, 2000 Educational Researcher article, "The TIMSS Final Year Study and Report: a Critique."
THE "ALL THINGS IN MODERATION" GOLDEN APPLE AWARD To: 3/4 Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute, 1/4 Ethan Bronner, New York Times
Rothstein won last year for his all-too-rational model of accountability. This year the prize derives from his articles on education every other Wednesday in the New York Times (now appearing weekly). These articles have to date provided balanced views of testing, accountability and other hot issues along with informative pieces on topics like the price paid in achievement by kids who move around a lot.
Bronner's share of the award is simply for having the good sense to hire Rothstein. He might have gotten more of it had he managed a better article placement. As it is, Rothstein's pieces appear deep in the "A" section in national editions, usually on the page before the editorials, in the "B" section of New York area editions.
You can find articles at www.nytimes.com, but be sure to get them the day they appear. They cost after that.
THE "TOTAL ABSENCE OF LOGIC AND JUST PURE MEANNESS" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: Jeanne Allen, Center for Education Reform
In her December, 1999 Newsletter, Allen wrote as follows:
"The following diatribe is from a person named Gerald Bracey, in response to a person inquiring whether or not social promotions and exit exams are designed to create a new underclass."
There follow three paragraphs that rework material that appeared briefly in "Why Can't They Be Like We Were?" and that was more elaborated in an Education Week "Commentary" article (March 28, 1994). I simply worked out something on my own that I later discovered economist John Kenneth Galbraith had already treated, namely that the structure of American society requires--demands--a group of poorly educated people to do the scut work. When reformers say they are going to educate everyone to high skill levels, they overlook that this means the country will fall apart. Educated people won't pick up the garbage, swab urinals in airports, make the beds in hotels, or handle baggage. Other countries that have previously faced this problem (Israel, Sweden, Germany, for instance), have all resorted to importing people from under-developed countries. My discourse is clear and dry, if harsh. No ranting. Allen, though, provides a diatribe one of her own:
"So the fact that education groups in Fairfax County, VA invited Bracey to speak about Virginia's standards at a forum earlier this fall is even more outrageous given where he stands. Because of his views, Bracey argues that Virginia's cut-off scores for passage on the state's new tests are too high and that these children are already doing as well as they should be according to his own, ahem, analysis." Well, I have argued repeatedly that cut scores that flunk 98% of the state's schools, including 93% of those in high-performing Fairfax are too high. When I look at data from the TIMSS-NAEP linking study and domestic test data, it is clear that had the students in Fairfax taken the TIMSS tests, at most one nation of the 41participating would have outscored Fairfax students in math and none would have in science.
Allen continues: "So on top of bigotry [my note: ????], we've got a situation in which even reputable education groups are thrilled to give imposters like this a podium to spew forth impressive sounding statistics in the name of alleged fairness. Fairness to people like this means having enough workers to take care of their garbage."
References:
Bracey, Gerald W. (1994). "What If Education Broke Out All Over?" Education Week, March 28, p. 44.
Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992). The Culture of Contentment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
THE "WILLIAM J. BENNETT CHICAGO-BASHING-URBAN-LEGEND-GENERATING" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD: To: Gery Chico, President, Chicago Board of Education.
We name this award in honor of the author of The Book of Virtues for having said at a September, 1998 meeting on choice and vouchers that 50% of Chicago public school students score at the first percentile. A few years earlier Bennett had referred to Chicago's schools as the nation's worst, so perhaps he was just confabulating data to back up his statement.
Chico receives this tribute for telling reporters at a May 22, 2000 press conference, " This [testing and retention in grade] is a very serious subject. I mean, I'm all for reading the research and I know, pretty much, both sides of the research. I'm not a devotee of giving single, high-stakes tests to a child and then determining their [sic] fate on that basis alone, But you have to understand, we came into a system where grade inflation, valedictorians who couldn't read was not an uncommon occurrence." An urban legend is born! Chico could not, or at least, did not, produce any evidence to the now-interested reporters.
George Schmidt, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher and publisher of the Chicago monthly, Substance (and fired by CPS for publishing the city's lousy tests in his paper), asked for the names of the student and the school. Chico said that Chicago Sun-Times reporter, Rosalyn Rossi, had written about it in an article. Rossi, present at the briefing, said she had written no such thing. Chico promised to produce the article.
His office sent an earlier article by Jacquelyn Heard, then a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, now Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's press secretary. It reported on twin sisters who were alleged to be on the honor roll at a Chicago high school, but who flunked the entrance examination at Malcolm X College because they were unable to read beyond a 6th grade level. The article said nothing about illiterate valedictorians.
Even so, its assertion about the twins, is itself the stuff of legends. As it turned out, the twins were both emotionally and mentally handicapped. They had in fact worked hard to obtain A's and B's under the requirements of their Individualized Education Plans. They were not part of any regular honors program. This was known to the reporter.
No one knows where the data on flunking the entrance exam at Malcolm X came from. Malcolm X is an open enrollment college with no entrance test.
THE "THEY SPENT HOW MUCH FOR THIS TURKEY?" GOLDEN APPLE AWARD. To: George N. Schmidt
NOTE: THIS AWARD DID NOT MAKE THE "10TH BRACEY REPORT" BECAUSE AT DEADLINE TIME, SCHMIDT'S STATUS WAS STILL IN LIMBO AND I DID NOT WANT TO ISSUE ANY COMMENT THAT MIGHT AFFECT THE SITUATION.
Chicago Public Schools system decided that other people's tests are not good enough and so built it's own. Schmidt looked at them, decided they were awful and published them in his January-February issue of his newspaper, Substance. Schmidt figured the tests were so bad they fell under the whistle-blower terms of CPS contracts. The Board of Education suspended him.
They should have suspended the people who created these tests. By their thumbs. They are full of stereotypes and oversimplifications. They treat the 40+ nations of Africa as an undifferentiated whole. In the test's items, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco are identical. Worse, from a testing perspective anyway, some of the questions had no right answers and some of them had multiple right answers. A kid could go nuts trying to figure out which answer to bubble in on the answer sheet.
Some of the questions cued answers to later questions and sometimes cued the wrong answer. For instance, one question asks for the definition of "climax" in a tragedy. A later question calls for the student to respond that the death of Romeo is the climax of Romeo and Juliet. But by the test's definition of "climax" as the terminal event, the climax would have to be the death of Juliet since she is still alive when Romeo expires. Juliet's demise is not an option on the test.
The Board also sued Schmidt for $1.4 million, claiming that to be the cost of replacing the now "useless" items. This works out to about $12,000 an item and if CPS is paying that much for the terrible items in its tests, I am in the wrong business.
Full disclosure: I testified twice on Schmidt's behalf and received an honorarium for my statements.
THE "SWALLOWING IT WHOLE" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States
William J. Bennett, former secretary of education
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., CEO, IBM
Tracy Thomas, President, Goldwater Institute
James Harvey, freelance writer (and actual author of "A Nation At Risk")
And probably any number of other politicians and journalists
All of the above named worthies accepted uncritically the new cliché for school bashing: The longer American kids stay in school, the dumber they get relative to their European peers. This is what the TIMSS results from grades 4, 8 and 12 show us.
There is likely some decline between grade four and grade eight. Ironically, part of that decline is due to the fact that American teachers try to teach too many things. American textbook publishers, wanting to sell to the largest possible market, take a kitchen-sink approach to textbook "writing". The result is that American textbooks are three times as thick as those in other nations. American teachers try to "cover" as much as possible, making coverage often brief and shallow.
Secondly, American educators have traditionally seen the middle grades as the culmination of elementary school, while European nations view it more as the start of the more intense academic instruction of secondary school. We look backward and review; they look forward with new topics.
The TIMSS Final Year study is such a mess that no firm conclusions can be drawn. However, when one parses through the findings and compares those American students who have the most in common with their European peers, one finds no further decline. For instance, in most countries, students are students and workers and workers. In the United States, most seniors are both. For TIMSS, 27% of American students said they worked more than 21 hours a week and 28% said they worked more than 35. Both durations negatively affect school achievement and this shows up on TIMSS. Americans who work fewer hours score at the international average, the same position as eighth graders scored.
My early criticisms of the TIMSS Final Year Study appeared in Kappan in May and September, 1998. My most complete critique was published in Educational Researcher, May 2000.
THE "MAYBE IT'S SOMETHING IN THE WATER GENERAL LOONINESS" ROTTEN APPLE AWARD To: Patti Barth and Kati Haycock of the Education Trust
The Education Trust seemed to be in a race all its own for most "over the top" statements of the year. Among these was this paragraph by Barth, part of an op-ed in the January 14, 2000 edition of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: "High standards must be for all students. 'High' should indicate that, at a minimum, high-school graduates are prepared for post-secondary schooling without remediation. This means algebra and geometry for all as well as laboratory sciences." At a minimum? Tell it to the more than 60% of the 9th graders who flunk algebra every year in Milwaukee. If Milwaukee's 9th grade gets any larger because so many kids fail algebra and lack the credits to become 10th graders, they'll have to erect a refugee camp to accommodate them all. According to Dennis Redovich, a retired Milwaukee educator who keeps a jaundiced eye on education in the city, many of these kids just eventually "disappear."
For her part, Haycock appeared on Nightline and made this assertion: "In fact, the '60's and '70's, a large part of the cheating [on tests] was in low-performing school, and the teachers were actually feeding the kids the wrong answers, because in those years you got more money from the federal government if your performance was low than you did if it was high." "A large part of the cheating???
Asked about her slanderous comment, Haycock emailed me "I most certainly did NOT say that "most" of the cheating was of the sort described." Confronted with a transcript showing precisely what she had said--the above quote--Haycock backed off and said she should have been more careful. Indeed. There were several other comments that I can't locate at the moment but together they are sufficient for me to say I have no trust in the Education Trust.
Posted 10/16/2000 to EDDRA
